Design preservation over subsequent releases of a software product: a case study of Baan ERP.

We present the results of two case studies we conducted at Baan in the Netherlands. At the time of conducting the case studies, Baan was part of Invensys plc. (Baan is now owned by SSA Global Technologies.) In these case studies we investigated how companies identify design erosion and address this in their software, a practice we call ‘design preservation’. In this study, we selected two sub-systems in Baan products that had recently been subjected to extensive maintenance activities because they were eroded. In this paper, we analyze the problems these systems had, how Baan identified that these systems were problematic, and the remedies that were used to address the problems. In addition to confirming some of our earlier conclusions, we have been able to extract some common causes for design erosion problems as well as a number of recommended design preservation practices, which, at least for Baan, have proven to be very effective in strengthening design preservation. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]