Managing Corporate Information Systems Evolution and Maintenance

Abstract

In 2005 Idea Group Publishing released another volume on issues in software maintenance. This follows their 2003 volume entitled Advances in Software Maintenance Management: Technologies and Solutions , which I also reviewed here ( Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice 2003; 15 (5): 375–377). A variety of readers, with a variety of goals, will find this 2005 book useful. While it is clearly not a textbook, particular chapters could be used in a classroom setting to expose students to current streams of research in software maintenance, as well as to different perspectives on basic maintenance issues. Practitioners will find practical information on particular maintenance problems they might be facing, including the migration of a large legacy system in general (Chapters 5, 13 and 8–11), or to the Web in particular (Chapters 6, 7 and 11), assessment of maintenance and organizational structure (Chapters 3, 4 and 14), and approaches for changing how an organization carries out software development and maintenance (Chapters 2, 12, 13 and 15), as well as on maintenance management (Chapter 1). While some of these chapters provide a level of detail sufficient to allow the reader to apply the techniques and methods described, most are not meant as recipes, or detailed how‐tos of techniques. Instead, the chapters provide the necessary overview, augmented by extensive lists of references. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.