A Rasch analysis on the usability model in applying CMM to improve the quality of software maintenance process

Maintenance plays an important role in the life cycle of a software product.It is estimated that there are more than 100 billion lines of code in production in the world. As much as 80% of it is unstructured, patched and not well documented. Maintenance can alleviate these problems. IEEE and ISO have both addressed software maintenance, the first with a specific standard and the latter as a part of its standard on life cycle processes. Multiple solutions to problem of software development have been proposed such as development methodology, management model and software tools. Software maintenance suffers because of the scarcity of management model that would facilitate its evaluation. This paper described a model of a quality software maintenance process. The proposed model is based on Capability Maturity Model of the Software Engineering Institute (CMM-SEI) to evaluate and enhance the software maintenance process. The architecture of the CMM model is retained while the development process is either modified or extended to take into account the characteristics specified to the maintenance function. These characteristics were then organized into key process areas as the new CMM model