AbstractThis paper is concerned with just‐in‐time (JIT) manufacturing techniques and how they can be applied to the management of software maintenance. Traditional maintenance methods focus on the change to be made or the defect to be fixed. Their aim is to get the product working as quickly as possible. This paper argues that this approach of pushing work through the maintenance system is flawed. The experience of the manufacturing industries which have global competitors, is that focusing only on results does not win. An alternative is to concentrate on the process of software maintenance. This paper reports on initial experiments with two teams of programmers using JIT techniques for maintaining software. The purpose was to see if JIT could produce benefits when applied to this knowledge‐intensive and unpredictable task. If there is a software maintenance process, then JIT may be a way to optimize the functioning of this process. JIT requires that fault fixes or changes to the software are pulled, rather than pushed, through the maintenance process. A functioning JIT process gives immediate information on the quality of the process because programmers return any work which is not correct.The conclusion is that JIT approaches can work and do improve the quality of the maintenance done. The key impediments to using JIT in maintenance are the changes it requires in the way people work and the requirement for a different focus in the management of software mainte