Efficient maintenance support in offshore software development: a case study on a global e-commerce project

Software maintenance is a very important phase in software development. It generally occupies the most of development life cycle in order to ensure software quality. This paper takes an e-commerce project as an example to study how to efficiently provide software maintenance support in offshore software development for a global deployed software product. Through interviews and a survey to the project developers, authors summarize the good methods and approaches used in its maintenance that greatly helped its success. Meanwhile, the authors also study lessons that influenced its efficient maintenance (e.g. extra workload caused by performance tuning, troubles due to sharp time-difference, problem- reproducing difficulty caused by testing environment difference and slow code transfer). Suggestions for further improvement are also proposed based on real experiences in order to benefit similar software development in the future.