Software Maintenance: Improvement through Better Development Standards and Documentation.

Abstract

Software maintenance is frequently the most expensive phase of the software life cycle. It is also the phase which has received insufficient attention by management and software developers. Software standards have improved the ability of the software community to develop and design software. Unfortunately, most standards do not deal with the maintenance phase in a substantive way. Since maintainability has to be designed into the software and cannot be achieved after the software is delivered, it is necessary to have software standards which explicitly incorporate requirements for maintainability. Accordingly, this report suggests design criteria for achieving maintainability and evaluates Weapons Specification WS 8506 and MIL-STD 1679 against these criteria. Using these documents as typical examples of military software standards, recommendations are made for improving the maintainability aspects of software standards. (Author)

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Feb 22, 1982
Accession Number
ADA113257

Entities

People

  • Norman F. Schneidewind

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Human Systems
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Application Software
  • Command And Control
  • Command And Control Systems
  • Computer Program Documentation
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Configuration Management
  • Control Systems
  • Department Of Defense
  • Information Processing
  • Military Standards
  • Quality Control
  • Resource Management
  • Software Development
  • Test And Evaluation

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Software Engineering
  • Software Engineering.
  • Systems Analysis and Design