Interaction Effects of Team Attributes and System Attributes in Software Maintenance Productivity

We investigate interaction effects of system attributes—age and volatility—and team attributes—instability and skill-diversity—on software maintenance productivity in the context of lifecycle maintenance involving multiple serial tasks (projects), unlike extant work’s focus on single maintenance tasks. Given the knowledge intensity of software maintenance, we apply knowledge creation theory to identify knowledge needs and challenges that system and team attributes create, then develop two theoretical predictions. First, team attributes adversely affect maintenance productivity while system attributes do not exhibit direct negative effects. Second, interactions of system and team attributes have offsetting (substitutive) effects on productivity since their knowledge needs and challenges overlap. We test our predictions using archival data on three years of maintenance work across 426 mission-critical systems at a Fortune 100 company, encompassing over 7500 maintenance tasks executed by thousands of maintainers. Our analysis yields two key insights. First, interactions diminish substantially the strong negative direct effects of team instability and skill-diversity on maintenance productivity—by as much as 20%. System volatility exhibits a small direct effect (0.38% productivity decline), while system age shows no significant direct effect. Second, interaction effects indicate that productivity declines as instable and skill-diverse teams are sharper when working on younger and less volatile systems—the opposite of conventional wisdom. For example, assigning a team with above-average instability to an above-average age system improves productivity by 3.06% through substitutive effects. Our findings demonstrate that congruence between system and team attributes can improve maintenance productivity, with substantial economic implications: organizations should strategically match team configurations to system characteristics rather than attempting to eliminate team instability or diversity universally.