Software maintenance and configuration management, software engineering

Unit-8
Software Maintenance
and Configuration
Management

Types of Maintenance
•Corrective Maintenance (21%)
• making changes to repair defects
•Adaptive Maintenance (25%)
• making changes to adapt software to external environment
changes (hardware, business rules, OS, etc.)
•Perfective Maintenance (50%)
• extending system beyond its original functional requirements
•Preventative Maintenance (4%)
• modifying work products so that they are more easily corrected,
adapted, or enhanced

Maintenance Costs
•Usually greater than the development costs (2
to 10 times as much in some cases)
•Affected by both technical and non-technical
factors
•Increase as software is maintained and system
corruption is introduced
•Aging software can have high support costs (e.g.
old languages, compilers, etc.)

Maintenance Developer Tasks
• Understand system.
• Locate information in documentation.
• Keep system documentation up to date.
• Extend existing functions.
• Add new functions.
• Find sources of errors.
• Correct system errors.
• Answer operations questions.
• Restructure design and code.
• Delete obsolete design and code.
• Manage changes.

Maintenance Cost Factors
•Staff turnover
• no turnover usually means lower maintenance costs
•Contractual responsibility
• developers may have no contractual obligation to maintain the
delivered system and no incentive to design for future change
•Staff skills
• maintenance staff are often inexperienced and have limited
domain knowledge
•Program age and structure
• as programs age their structure deteriorates, they become harder
to understand and change

Maintenance Prediction
•Concerned with determining which parts of the
system may cause problems and have high
maintenance costs
•Change acceptance depends on the
maintainability of the components affected by the
change
•Implementing changes degrade system and
reduces its maintainability
•Maintenance costs depends on number of
changes

Configuration Management
•Software changes are inevitable
•One goal of software engineering is to improve how easy
it is to change software
•Configuration management is all about change control.
•Every software engineer has to be concerned with how
changes made to work products are tracked and
propagated throughout a project.
•To ensure quality is maintained the change process must
be audited.

Configuration Management
Definition:
The set of activities that have been developed to
manage change throughout the software life
cycle.
Purpose:
Systematically control changes to the
configuration and maintain the integrity and
traceability of the configuration throughout the
system’s life cycle.

Purpose of CM
• Identify Change
• Control Change
• Ensure Change is Properly Implemented
• Report Changes to All the people who need to
Know

Baseline
•Definition: Specification or product that
• has been formally reviewed and agreed upon,
• serves as the basis for further development, and
• can be changed only through formal change control procedures.
•Signals a point of departure from one activity to the start
of another activity.
•Helps control change without impeding justifiable change.

Project Baseline
•Central repository of reviewed and approved
artifacts that represent a given stable point
in overall system development.
•Shared DB for project and kept in consistent
state.
•Policies allow the team to achieve consistent
state and manage the project.

Software Configuration Item (SCI)
•Definition: Information that is created as part of the
software engineering process.
•Examples:
•Software Project Plan
•Software Requirements Specification
• Models, Prototypes, Requirements
•Design document
• Protocols, Hierarchy Graphs
•Source code
• Modules
•Test suite
•Software tools (e.g., compilers)

Elements of SCM
There are four elements of SCM:
1. Software Configuration Identification
2. Software Configuration Control
3. Software Configuration Auditing
4. Software Configuration Status Accounting

SCM Tasks
•Identification
•Change control
•Version control
•Configuration auditing
•Status reporting

Identification Task
• Identification separately names each CSCI and then organizes it in
the SCM repository using an object-oriented approach
• Objects start out as basic objects and are then grouped into
aggregate objects
• Each object has a set of distinct features that identify it
• A name that is unambiguous to all other objects
• A description that contains the CSCI type, a project identifier,
and change and/or version information
• List of resources needed by the object
• The object realization (i.e., the document, the file, the model,
etc.)

Change Control Task
• Change control is a procedural activity that ensures quality and consistency as
changes are made to a configuration object
• A change request is submitted to a configuration control authority, which is usually a
change control board (CCB)
• The request is evaluated for technical merit, potential side effects, overall impact on other
configuration objects and system functions, and projected cost in terms of money, time, and
resources
• An engineering change order (ECO) is issued for each approved change request
• Describes the change to be made, the constraints to follow, and the criteria for review and
audit
• The baselined CSCI is obtained from the SCM repository
• Access control governs which software engineers have the authority to access and modify a
particular configuration object
• Synchronization control helps to ensure that parallel changes performed by two different
people don't overwrite one another

Version Control Task
• Version control is a set of procedures and tools for managing the
creation and use of multiple occurrences of objects in the SCM
repository
• Required version control capabilities
• An SCM repository that stores all relevant configuration objects
• A version management capability that stores all versions of a configuration
object (or enables any version to be constructed using differences from past
versions)
• A make facility that enables the software engineer to collect all relevant
configuration objects and construct a specific version of the software
• Issues tracking (bug tracking) capability that enables the team to record and
track the status of all outstanding issues associated with each configuration
object
• The SCM repository maintains a change set
• Serves as a collection of all changes made to a baseline configuration
• Used to create a specific version of the software
• Captures all changes to all files in the configuration along with the reason for
changes and details of who made the changes and when

Configuration Auditing Task
• Configuration auditing is an SQA activity that helps to ensure that quality is
maintained as changes are made
• It complements the formal technical review and is conducted by the SQA group
• It addresses the following questions
• Has a formal technical review been conducted to assess technical correctness?
• Has the software process been followed, and have software engineering standards been
properly applied?
• Has the change been "highlighted" and "documented" in the CSCI? Have the change
data and change author been specified? Do the attributes of the configuration object
reflect the change?
• Have SCM procedures for noting the change, recording it, and reporting it been
followed?
• Have all related CSCIs been properly updated?
• A configuration audit ensures that
• The correct CSCIs (by version) have been incorporated into a specific build
• That all documentation is up-to-date and consistent with the version that has been built

Status Reporting Task
• Configuration status reporting (CSR) is also called status
accounting
• Provides information about each change to those personnel in an
organization with a need to know
• Answers what happened, who did it, when did it happen, and
what else will be affected?
• Sources of entries for configuration status reporting
• Each time a CSCI is assigned new or updated information
• Each time a configuration audit is conducted
• The configuration status report
• Placed in an on-line database or on a website for software developers and
maintainers to read
• Given to management and practitioners to keep them appraised of
important changes to the project CSCIs

Software Configuration Auditing

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