Maturity of maintenance [software]

The SEI maturity model has been successfully used for evaluating the software process at both the project and organization levels. The SEI model includes specific questions for software maintenance and contains maintenance implicitly as a part of the total maturity level of an organization. In the present work, the authors argue that the SEI model can also be used more specifically for defining the majority level of maintenance work of an organization. They give reasons and discuss possibilities of the use of the SEI model for evaluating the maturity level of maintenance, and present results gathered in Europe during the ESPRIT project BOOTSTRAP. In the light of their findings the authors argue that the current dichotomy between maintenance and development should be changed so that the development of the maintenance process should be considered as a part of the whole software process development in the organizations