Significance of Ticket Analytics in Effective Software Maintenance: Awareness

Abstract

Software even though intangible should undergo evolution to fit into the ever changing real world scenarios. In this context software maintenance is an inevitable activity; further optimizing the activities related to maintenance is not possible due to the lacuna in various aspects of the pre-production phases. Since 1969, the issues raised by Lehman related to software maintenance remain the same. Each issue faced by the maintenance team directly reflects in the quality of the software product. According to the related work, very few research is going on in the field of software maintenance and still scarce when it comes to research on incident and associated ticket; a part of corrective maintenance. In depth research on incident tickets should be viewed as critical since, it provides information related to the kind of maintenance activities that is performed in any timestamp. Therefore classifying and analyzing tickets becomes a critical task in managing the operations of the service since each incident will be having a service level agreement associated with it. Further, incident analysis is essential to identify the patterns associated. Due to the existence of huge population of software in each organization and millions of incidents get reported per software product every year, it is practically impossible to manually analyze all the tickets. This paper focuses on projecting the importance of ticket analytics to maintain the quality of software products and also identifying the incidents and related tickets based on various factors which are supported by a case study from the data collected from various organizations.