A quantitative approach for evaluating software maintenance services.

The ever-increasing representativeness of software maintenance in the daily effort of software team requires initiatives for enhancing the activities accomplished to provide a good service for users who request a software improvement. This article presents a quantitative approach for evaluating software maintenance services based on cluster analysis techniques. The proposed approach provides a compact characterization of the services delivered by a maintenance organization, including characteristics such as service, waiting, and queue time. The ultimate goal is to help organizations to better understand, manage, and improve their current software maintenance process. We also report in this paper the usage of the proposed approach in a medium-sized organization throughout 2010. This case study shows that 72 software maintenance requests can be grouped in seven distinct clusters containing requests with similar characteristics. The in-depth analysis of the clusters found with our approach can foster the understanding of the nature of the requests and, consequently, it may improve the process followed by the software maintenance team.