Eliciting Theory for Software Maintenance SLA Management Framework
Syed Irtiza Hassan, Ahmad Salman Khan · 2017
Software maintenance is the largest phase of 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 about 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 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 study provides a basis for producing a comprehensive software maintenance SLA to be applicable in industrial setting.