Eliciting CM3: Emergency Problem Management at Scandinavian Airline Systems

Emergency software problems may present an immediate danger to public health, safety, general welfare or business. Hence, the organisations must be well prepared to handle them with the greatest expediency. Unfortunately, the software community has paid little attention to the emergency corrective maintenance. Today, we do not have any standard process models for handling emergency situations. In this paper, we outline an emergency corrective maintenance process model. The model is called CM3: Emergency Problem Management. It is based on an industrial process model as defined at Scandinavian Airline Systems. In addition to the emergency process model, we present the status within the emergency process at Scandinavian Airline Systems, and describe the lessons learned. ACM Classification: D.2 (Software Engineering), D.2.7 (Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement), D.2.9 (Management)