Establishment of Requirements - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 86

would enter into a contract describing the process for resolution of software
maintenance work orders, the turnaround times, prioritization policies, cost esti-
mation, guidelines for code maintenance, and payment for the work carried out etc.
Then each work request would be handled in conformance with the contract.
Software maintenance work is classified under two heads, namely, software
modification (including bug/defect fixing, modification to meet a changed
requirement, or effecting some change to improve productivity etc.) and functional
expansion. For software modification, the process would be as follows:
1. Receive the request
2. Replicate the described scenario in development environment
3. Locate the piece of code needing modification
4. Effect the required code modification conforming to software maintenance
guidelines
5. Subject the modifications to quality control activities
6. Deliver the fix.
Some of the maintenance requests would be so urgent/small as to deliver in two
hours. Others would have to be delivered within one business week at the most. In
view of the short turnaround times, there is not much scope for formalized analysis
and documentation in software modification type of maintenance work.
Functional expansion is normally adding additional functionality to the existing
software and would involve building new code rather than code modification. This
normally would be handled as a fresh software development project. However,
such functional expansion projects would be of relatively shorter duration and
would range from one calendar month to a maximum of one calendar year. The
requirements establishment procedure and templates described in the foregoing
sections for software development projects would be utilized for this kind of
software maintenance scenario.
5.8 Establishment of Requirements in Migration, Porting
and Conversion Projects
Migration projects involve migration of an existing system from one version of a
software platform to a newer version of the same platform. The objective of these
projects is to make use of the better facilities available in the new version which
may include better response time, better user interface or better integration with
other systems.
Porting projects move the existing system from one hardware platform to
another hardware platform keeping the same software platform. The objective of
these projects is to make use of a more robust hardware platform to cater to an
increased load and to provide better response times to users.