By N2H

Factors contributing to difficulties in Maintenance

November 1, 2007

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Limited user knowledge

The maintenance team deals with limitations of human understanding. Users understanding create a problem since they don’t have the skill or the understanding and thus it brings about unclear and incomplete problem report from them.

Thus the maintenance team needs to have good “people skills”. They must be able to know how different people think and work and they must be flexible in communication.

Management priorities

Management view maintenance activities as more important than the development of new application thus the maintenance team may be under pressure from the management to repair old systems even though users want new systems.

Problems of morale

Maintenance team of programmers is usually viewed as a second class status to development team of programmers thus affects their productivity

Programmer time

Programmers usually carry out various projects simultaneously thus demand on programmers time leads to conflicting priorities and thus unable to concentrate on one problem.

Problem of compromise

Some problems with the system may require a quick intelligent way of fixing problems usually this may not fit in with the design and coding style, thus this becomes a situation which requires a compromise either a quick fix or a procedural software engineering recommended way which will cost money and time.

Cost of maintenance

The cost may also bring in difficulties of maintaining a system.

Automated Maintenance tools

Text editors

It has the ability to copy a group of lines of codes from one place to another, thus saving the analyst from getting duplication errors and also saves his time of writing the codes again.

They have features which stores, the changes to one file in another separate file. This method is useful in making changes; they also provide a roll back facility to enable the earlier version to take place.

File comparison

This is a program that compares two files and reports differences between them. This program is used to ensure that a system or program that is supposed to be similar is as expected.

Compiler and linkage editors

These tools have features that simplify maintenance and configuration management. A compiler checks for syntax errors and for consistency across separately compiled components. When the code is compiled properly the linkage editor links the code with other modules required for running the program. Some linkage editors keep track of version numbers and ensure that the correct version numbers are linked together.

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