The Impact of Operating System Obsolescence on the Life Cycle of Distributed Teams

Operating System obsolescence is widely considered an important factor when architectural choices are made during the planning phase of systems development and maintenance. In this work, we seek to understand the importance that planners actually ascribe to this attribute in practice, and ask probing questions to the managers, developers, and analysts of systems in industry in the form of a survey. Initial results suggest that obsolescence is neither perceived as a critical factor during planning for systems development, nor is it viewed as a major contributor to the total cost of operation of client/server systems. However, the survey does identify that organizations have a number of valid and functional coping strategies when obsolescence does affect systems operations.