------Lorie Mcaleb posted ------------------
I have been researching information on internally developed software and the
need for a retention to be applied to these programs. I searched the
archives and did not find anything relating to this subject, but thought
others on the ListServ may have addressed this in their retention policies.
We have numerous groups that design software for a specific purposes. The
data has its functional retention applied to it, but how long should we
retain the software programs used to generate the data or subsets of the
data? Each of these programs have numerous versions, a version is created
each time the program is updated. Do we need to keep all of the versions? If
the data is converted to a new program there is no need for the software
versions for data access, but we have had instances where we had to prove we
created a program before another company so I'm at a loss as to what the
retention should be.

If anyone has dealt with this issue I would appreciate feedback. Thanks

-------reply -------
For the Australian Government, the retention period for production software
is "Destroy 5 years after (sub)system is defunct and any data supported is
either migrated or destroyed".  This should ensure that any data created by
the application is retreivable, and allows for code to be available (to be
reused in other applications, or to show when you had something in place,
etc) for a reasonable length of time.

This is entry 2086 of the Administrative Functions Disposal Authority
available at
http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/disposal/authorities/gda/afda/summary.ht
ml


John Lovejoy
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