Eliciting Theory about a Retirement Process

The software community has been so much focused on creating and improving development and evolution processes, so that it has completely forgotten retirement. Today, there are no retirement process models whatsoever despite the fact that many software organizations desperately need guidelines for retiring their old software systems. In this paper, we elicit a retirement process model and compare it to the current retirement process models. Our goal is to educe theory about retirement process, evaluate current retirement process standards and provide feedback for their extension. The elicitation process has been made within one Nordic financial company.