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Title |
A Framework of Service Level Agreement Management for Software Maintenance |
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Author |
Syed Irtiza Hassan, Ahmad Salman Khan |
| Citation |
Vol. 19 No. 5 pp. 103-112 |
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Abstract |
Software maintenance is the largest phase of the software development lifecycle. It’s a complex activity due to the diverse nature of services provided during this phase. Therefore, it is significant that the parties involved in maintenance should decide and agree upon the nature and level of maintenance services upfront. This paper discusses the important issue of Service Level Agreement for software maintenance. We conducted a systematic literature review to explore the state of the art and then applied the grounded theory method for formulating the preliminary SLA management framework. We elicited six major phases of SLA management including Service Templates Development, SLA Negotiation, Service Deployment, Service Execution, Service Assessment, and Service Decommissioning. This paper presents a framework for comprehensively managing software maintenance service level agreement. Case studies were conducted in five IT organizations that perform software maintenance to validate and enhance the framework. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis was performed and the refined framework reflected the best practices from industry enhancements were made in every phase of the framework. Furthermore, it was identified that there is a gap in industrial practice as far as the process of service deployment, assessment and corrective actions over SLA and adjustment patterns and manageability for modifying SLA are concerned. |
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Keywords |
service level agreement, software maintenance |
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