Issues with Third Party Maintenance of Software Intensive Legacy Systems: A Case Study - Avionic Mission Systems

摘要

The software maintenance burden in military and industrial applications is well known. A variety of factors influence the evolution of large legacy systems, and system upgrades have always been a challenge in terms of avoiding schedule and cost overruns. This evolution becomes even more of a challenge when it is implemented by an organisation other than the original developers. When maintaining complex legacy systems, third party maintenance organisations are placed under additional constraints. Some of these additional constraints come from the decisions made by the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) on the development processes they use and the Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools that were used to aid in the system development. This paper will describe and analyse a particular case where this occurred with the maintenance of the AP-3C Orion fleet for the Australia Defence Force by Tenix Aerospace and Defence.