Demarcating the Scope of a Predelivery Maintenance Process

Predelivery maintenance is one of the processes that has not received enough attention both within the academia and industry. Still, it counts as one of the least visible lifecycle processes. In this paper, we make it more visible by demarcating its scope within software lifecycle. We do it within eleven companies. Our goal is to find out how the industry understands predelivery maintenance and how it places it within software lifecycle. Our results show that predelivery maintenance is conducted by all the organizations studied in five different contexts. These organizations however use different terms for it or they treat predelivery maintenance as part of other processes. For this reason, we conclude that predelivery maintenance is a process that cross-cuts several lifecycle processes.© 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.QC 2012022