I think that I rather agree with Richard that maintenance is intellectually
quite a demanding task, and Y2K issues have certainly brought it much more
to the attention of many organisations!
There is a 1992 delphi survey (but mostly of managers) that I have used with
my students, which I have cited below. However, that looks more at the
factors affecting maintenance, rather than at the people themselves. I will
also copy this response to Keith Bennett, who might know of more recent data.
David Budgen
Delphi Study of Software Maintenance Problems, S Dekleva, Proceedings
of the Conference on Software Maintenance 1992, IEEE Computer Society Press,
1992, 10--17
``The Delphi technique was used to compile a list of major problems in
software maintenance, quantify them, and strengthen the consensus in
iterations. Forty-four experienced software maintenance professionals
responded in the final round. Assembled rationales and arguments provide an
abundance of information on maintenance problems, their causes and
consequences. Maintenance problems were grouped into four problem
categories: maintenance management, organizational environment, personnel
factors, and system characteristics. Problems from the maintenance
management category dominate the top of the major problems list.
Relationships among problem categories and their causations were analysed.
The data show that the organisational environment influences maintenance
management problems which in turn influence problems from the personnel
factors category. Personnel problems are also dependent on system
characteristics.''
> This isn't really a psychology of programming question, more of a software
> engineering one... Does anybody know of any surveys of software
> maintenance personnel? Generally maintenance seems to be an activity that
> does not have a lot of prestige attached to it. Would this have an effect
> upon the 'type' of people that are given maintenance tasks? Highly thought
> of developers undertake high prestige development projects, while new
> programmers may be assigned mundane, rather dull maintenance tasks. It
> 'feels' like an area where something must have been published...
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Chris Douce
>
