Software Preservation Benefits Framework

Abstract

An investigation of software preservation has been carried out by Curtis+Cartwright Consulting Limited, in partnership with the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI), on behalf of the JISC. The aim of the study was to raise awareness and build capacity throughout the Further and Higher Education (FE/HE) sector to engage with preservation issues as part of the process of software development. Part of this involved examining the purpose and benefits of employing preservation measures in relation to software, both at the development stage and retrospectively to legacy software. The study built on the JISC-funded ‘Significant Properties of Software’ study that produced an excellent introduction and comprehensive framework to software preservation. This is a framework document that assists developer groups and their sponsoring bodies to understand and gauge the benefits or disbenefits of allocating effort to: – ensuring that preservation measures are built into software development processes; – actively preserving legacy software.