This paper investigates how maintainability can be established in system integration (SI) projects where maintainers have no direct access to the source code of the third-party software being integrated. We propose a model for maintainability in SI focusing on postrelease activities, unlike traditional maintainability models where focus is on pre-release activities. Our model describes maintainability as a process characterized by ambiguity and negotiation that is supported through an infrastructure of debugging and coordination tools. Further, we describe how the process going from a software failure to establishing the fault causing the failure can be managed in SI. The results presented in this paper are based on observations from an ethnographic study of the Gentoo open source software (OSS) community, a large distributed volunteer community of over 320 developers developing and maintaining a software system for distributing and integrating third-party OSS software packages with different Unix versions. 1.

The Internet and WEB pervasivenesses are changing the landscape of several different areas, ranging from information gathering/managing and commerce to software development, maintenance and evolution. Software companies having a geographically distributed structure, or geographically distributed customers, are adopting information communication technologies to cooperate. Communication technologies and infrastructures allow the companies to create a virtual software factory. This paper proposes to adopt queue theory to deal with an economically relevant category of problems: the staffing, the process management and the service level evaluation of massive maintenance projects in a virtual software factory. Data from a massive corrective maintenance intervention were used to simulate and study different service center configurations, in particular, a monolithic configuration and a configuration corresponding to a multi-phase maintenance process where several maintenance centers cooperated. Queue theory allowed effective control of the process supporting project management decisions. The mathematical tool provided a means to assess staffing, evaluate service level and balance the workload between maintenance centers while executing the project.

Motivation. Software maintenance is a significant part of the software life-cycle cost. Current research focuses on the maintenance of application software. Despite increased focus on systems integration, there is limited research on maintaining integrated systems. Before progressing with informing software integration practice, researchers therefore need to better understand the actual work of maintaining integrated systems. Research. To this end, a study of maintaining an integrated system in practice has been conducted. The study is conducted in the context of a community of volunteer software integrators. The research combines field studies with document analysis, asking: RQ1: How is knowledge of software failures developed during geographically distributed software maintenance? RQ2: How do software developers build knowledge of how to replace a businesscritical software system? RQ3: What are the characteristics of large-scale software maintenance work in a geographically distributed community of volunteers? Contributions. The main empirical contribution offered by this thesis is insight into the social

This position paper reports on the findings of an empirical pilot study of Gentoo Linux. Gentoo Linux is an open source Linux distribution developed by a geographically distributed community of volunteers. The reported findings are based on the analysis of a specific episode using actor network theory. With basis in the analysis, it is argued that control in this specific episode can be interpreted as both distributed and local at the same time. Control here being the power to define a problem and make the decision about the appropriate solution to the problem defined. Control, it is argued, is distributed in that it is the function of reciprocal influence among several human and non-human actors. Furthermore, it is argued that control can be interpreted as not inherent in organizational structures or hierarchies, but locally embedded among actors in the decision making process. 1.