Abstract
The Internet and WEB pervasivenesses are changing the landscape of several different areas, ranging from information gathering/managing and commerce to software development, maintenance and evolution. Software companies having a geographically distributedstructure, or geographically distributed customers, areadopting information communication technologies tocooperate.Communicationtechnologies andinfrastructuresallow the companies to create a virtual software factory. This paper proposes to adopt queue theory to deal with an economically relevant categoryof problems:the staffing, theprocess management and the service level evaluationof massive maintenance projects in a virtual software factory. Data froma massive corrective maintenance interventionwere used to simulateandstudy differentservicecenterconfigurations,in particular, a monolithic configuration and a configuration correspondingtoamulti-phasemaintenance processwhereseveral maintenance centers cooperated. Queuetheory allowed effectivecontrol of theprocess supporting project management decisions.Themathematical tool provided a means toassess staffing,evaluateservicelevel and balancethe workload between maintenance centers while executing the project.