September 16, 2009

I’m a developer; there is no money in maintenance.

Software Maintenance Blog
William A Clements
“I’m a developer; there is no money in maintenance.”
Beside self made programmers, most schools, universities are producing program developer who develops code more and more efficiently.
  • Where does all that code end up?
  • What happen to the program when it needs to be fixed?
It ends up in the world of software maintenance.
The following chart represents the cost of software maintenance compared to the entire cost of life of a program. The relative cost for maintaining software and managing its evolution now represents more than 90% of its total cost. Various studies on this subject are described in Table 1.
Table 1. Proportional software maintenance costs for its supplier. [[1]]
Year
Proportion of software maintenance costs
Definition
Reference
2000
>90%
Software cost devoted to system maintenance & evolution / total software costs
Erlikh (2000)
1993
75%
Software maintenance / information system budget
(in Fortune 1000 companies)
Eastwood (1993)
1990
>90%
Software cost devoted to system maintenance & evolution / total software costs
Moad (1990)
1990
60-70%
Software maintenance / total management information systems (MIS) operating budgets
Huff (1990)
1988
60-70%
Software maintenance / total management information systems (MIS) operating budgets
Port (1988)
1984
65-75%
Effort spent on software maintenance / total available software engineering effort.
McKee (1984)
1981
>50%
Staff time spent on maintenance / total time (in 487 organizations)
Lientz & Swanson (1981)
1979
67%
Maintenance costs / total software costs
Zelkowitz et al. (1979)
Table 2: Evolution of maintenance costs. [[2]]
Reference
Year
% Maintenance
Lientz and Swanson (1980)
1976
60%
Pigoski, (1996)
1980-1984
55%
Schach (1990)
1987
67%
Pigoski (1996)
1985-1989
75%
Frazer (1992)
1990
80%
Pigoski (1996)
90’s (prev.)
90%


[2] Polo, Piattini, and Ruiz; “Advances in Software Maintenance Management – Technologies and Solutions”, Idea Group Publishing, London 2003 http://skillport.books24x7.com

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