Virtual Community Use for Packaged Software Maintenance

In this study, we investigated the use of virtual communities for involving distributed customers in the maintenance of packaged software. On the basis of an empirical study, we suggest that virtual communities can be usefully leveraged for corrective, adaptive, and perfective software maintenance. Specifically, the virtual community allowed for quick discovery of bugs and a rich interaction between developers and customers in the categories of corrective and adaptive software maintenance. However, although contributing also to the perfective category of software maintenance, this was the category in which several customer suggestions for modification were actually ignored by the developers. This implies that community use is indeed beneficial for maintenance related to coding and design errors as well as for maintenance of an adaptive character. However, it has limitations when associated with major changes such as software functionality addition or modification as those experienced in the category of perfective maintenance.