Analysis of maintenance work categories through measurement

Empirical data from a two-year measurement effort in the software maintenance environment of a Canadian organization are presented. The findings reported are based on a daily data-collection process including 2152 work requests which required 11365 days to complete. This set of empirical data confirms some of the findings of the opinion surveys in terms of the stability of the overall workload distribution in the maintenance area, while the analysis of any subset of data indicates that this overall average hides significant differences. The authors include a discussion on the improved measurement program implemented, and illustrate how insights into the maintenance process are gained through various measurements