Total Quality Maintenance (TQMain) A predictive and proactive maintenance concept for software

Abstract: This thesis describes an investigation of the possibility to apply a maintenance concept originally developed for the industry, on software maintenance. Today a large amount of software development models exist but not many of them treat maintenance as a part of the software life cycle. In most cases maintenance is depicted as an activity towards the end of the software life cycle. The high cost ascribed to software maintenance motivates for improvements. The maintenance concept TQMain proposed in this thesis distinguishes from other maintenance concepts by its use of preventive, predictive and proactive maintenance strategies. TQMain uses a common database to store real-time data from various departments and uses it for analyse and assessment to track the development of deviations in the condition of the production process and product quality at an early stage. A continuous cyclic improvement of the maintenance strategy is reached by comparing the data from the real-time measurements with data from the database. The ISO/IEC Software engineering – Product qualities is used as a source of empiric data to conclude that the correct quality characteristics are used for identifying software product quality and its characteristics and compare them with the characteristics of industrial product quality. The results presented are that in the conceptual outline of TQMain measures are obviously not the same as in software maintenance, but the aspect of product quality is common for both. The continuous cyclic improvement of the product quality that TQMain features together with the aspect of detecting potential failures before they occur would, judging from the conceptual outline of TQMain be applicable on software maintenance.