Information Resources Management Journal, 25(4), 1-25, October-December 2012 1
Task-Resource Capability
Alignment:
Discerning Staffing and Service
Issues in Software Maintenance
Rafay Ishfaq, Department of Aviation and Supply Chain Management, Auburn University,
Auburn, AL, USA
Uzma Raja, Department of Information Systems, Statistics, and Management Science,
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA
ABSTRACT
The effective management of software maintenance processes involves decisions about workforce levels, skill
and expertise mix of developers, assignment of defect resolution tasks, and monitoring key system performance
measures. This research uses a queuing based simulation approach to study these managerial issues. Using the
data archives of a large global software organization, an empirical study of the historical defect reports and
management decisions is conducted. A task-resource capability alignment scheme is developed that captures
the defect complexity and skill/experience capabilities of software maintainers. The results of the empiricalcomputational study show that the defect arrival/reporting process affects the resource utilization and the
time a defect spends in the system. The results also highlight the role of dedicated and shared resources on the
system performance and indicate that replacing an experienced and skilled developer requires a significant
order of magnitude increase in the maintenance workforce.
Keywords:
Defect Resolution, Resource Allocation, Simulation, Software Maintenance, Task Assignment
INTRODUCTION
In any software system, maintenance is an
inevitable process (Lehman & Belady, 1985).
Software maintenance refers to the process of
managing changes in a software product after
it is released for use. The maintenance activities are generally classified as: (a) corrective,
which relates to repairing a fault, (b) adaptive
DOI: 10.4018/irmj.2012100101
in terms of handling new requirements, and (c)
perfective, which is focused on improving the
system performance (Lientz & Swanson, 1980).
System users, software project managers and
system developers can initiate maintenance
requests. Software product managers evaluate
these requests from a cost and impact perspective. Once approved, requests for change can
result in several activities, e.g., system analysis, re-design, prototyping and validation of
the system components. Once all the needed
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2 Information Resources Management Journal, 25(4), 1-25, October-December 2012
changes have been implemented and verified,
the new version (containing all the changes) is
released to the users (Arther, 1988; Banker &
Slaughter, 1997).
Managing the software maintenance
process and defect resolution activities in an
organization is a challenging management
function (Swanson & Beath, 1979). Efficient
management of the software maintenance
process requires matching the capacity and
capability of software developers (referred to
as resources) with the defects of varying levels
of complexity (Ngo-The & Ruhe, 2009). The
defects are reported to a team of software developers, which handles these defects through
a software defect resolution (SDR) process.
A defect identifier, a defect category, the skill
requirements of maintenance resources and a
due date for defect resolution, parameterize
each software defect. The actual time to resolve
a defect depends on the skill and experience
level of the assigned developer and the inherent complexity of the defect. The total time a
defect spends in the SDR process (referred to
as system) consists of the time spent to resolve
the defect and the queue wait time, when the
assigned team member is busy working on a
defect assigned earlier.
There are generally two perspectives regarding the software defect resolution process:
the perception of the customer, and the internal
perception of the software company (April,
Hayes, Abran, & Dumke, 2005). This paper
studies the defect resolution process from the
latter perspective. In a software company, the
activities of a defect resolution process have
typical characteristics (Abran & Nguyenkim,
1993). The defects arrive in a random manner
and are managed more in line with a queuemanagement approach rather than as managing
a project. The defects are reviewed and managed
according to their assigned priorities, which
may change at any time.
The SDR considered in this paper is described in Figure 1. The defects of a particular
software product are reported to the manager
of the software maintenance team. The team
manger classifies the defect by assigning it a
priority based on the type and its significance.
The team manager uses allocation rules to assign
a software developer to resolve the defect. This
allocation depends on the developer(s) capability, defect resolution requirements, availability
of the developer(s) and their assigned workload.
Software developers manage their individual
work queues according to some sequencing
rule. A defect is handled and resolved before
the next defect is taken up. The resolved defects
exit the system.
The performance of the SDR process is
evaluated based on the system level performance
targets. The performance measures most often
used are; completion time, timeliness and
throughput (Leung, 2004). The completion time
measure relates to the sequencing and scheduling of activities which will ensure that either a
single or a batch of defects is resolved in the
shortest possible time, given the limitations of
the available resources. The timeliness measure
refers to the ability of the SDR process to conform to some required time-line associated with
resolving a specific software defect, say by a
given deadline for a new product version release
or meeting the operational targets such as the
average queue waiting time and the average
time spent by a defect in the system. The third
measure, throughput, relates to the performance
of the resources in terms of how many defects
are resolved by a resource in a fixed period of
time or in terms of the resource utilization,
which measures the percentage of available
time a resource uses to fix the defects.
The purpose of this research is to evaluate
the managerial issues related to the SDR process
focused on defect-resource allocation policies,
staffing levels and resource skill requirements.
The specific objectives of this research are:
(a) study the role of the dedicated and shared
resources (software developers) in improving
the efficiency of the SDR process, and (b) study
the marginal impact of the changes in the mix
of resources and their skill levels on the system
performance. The rest of this paper is organized
as follows: First, we discuss the prior research in
the area of software maintenance and the defect
resolution process. The next section presents
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