A Pragmatic Approach for Software Maintenance Process

This paper describes the use of a process support tool that is used to collect metrics for upgrading our electronic retail system. The incremental prototype lifecycle approach is used in which each increment is categorized by an effort type and a project component. The different effort types used to span all phases of development are as acquire, build, comprehend and design. The project components include data and process models expressed by an object oriented modeling language and process algebra respectively. The components are build using C++ classes and function templates that include source and data files. This categorization is independent from incremental prototype approach and equally applicable to other software lifecycles also. The process support tool i.e. process wise integrator (PWI) ensure the consistency between models and C++ source code. It also supports the interaction between multiple developers and multiple metric collectors.