Recurring Distributed Software Maintenance Meetings: Toward an Initial Understanding

Meetings have always been a significant part of working life and software development is no exception, with meetings of all kinds taking place daily. One type of meeting that is critical to software development that has not been widely studied to date is the recurring software maintenance meeting: a regularly scheduled meeting during which the primary product leads consider emerging issues and new directions for an already deployed and functioning software system. In this paper, we describe preliminary results of our ongoing analysis of ten consecutive recurring maintenance meetings of the architecture committee of a major healthcare software company. The results provide a foundation for further analysis in terms of first building a categorization of the kinds of discussions that take place. We present the setting, our approach to analysis, and preliminary observations. A primary outcome is that the kinds of discussions are much more varied than one might have initially expected.