Patent ID: 7721257

Claim:
A method for effecting software maintenance in a software system landscape comprising a central control system and a plurality of logical systems interconnected by logical transport paths, each logical system having associated therewith one of a plurality of system roles, the method comprising: providing system role types, each of the system role types comprising a group of system roles; providing an association of tasks to the system role types; providing a transport track, the transport track defining a route for software services through a group of systems in a particular order and specifying one source system in which software services are permitted, adjacent interconnected systems, and at least one target system, each of the software services relating to at least one of a computer code and associated data of at least one system in the landscape; generating automatically a maintenance instance in the central system from the system role types, the association and the transport tracks, the maintenance instance defining tasks for effecting a periodic software service in a maintenance interval, generating the maintenance instance involves analyzing the transport tracks to identify affected systems, analyzing the systems to identify their system roles, analyzing the system roles to identify their type, and compiling required tasks for the affected systems according to a list which contains different mapped tasks for the different system role types of each system on the transport track; and carrying out the tasks in the respective affected system after logon to the system.