Dynamics of software maintenance

Abstract

As the information technology industry gains maturity, the number of software systems having moved into maintenance is rapidly growing. Often these systems are also potential candidates for outsourcing. However, adequate information regarding size, complexity, reliability, maintainability etc. of these systems is often missing. This makes the task of estimating maintenance efforts for any such system difficult for the organization owning the systems as well as for a software services vendor bidding to outsource maintenance of the system. This is further compounded by human and management factors related to maintenance activities such as management focus, client attitude, engineers' attitude, the need for multi-location support teams etc. These factors make the problem of objectively estimating software maintenance effort almost intractable.We submit that software maintenance is of equal if not more fundamental importance to the software industry, and has not received the attention it deserves, especially in the context of estimation models.This paper describes a holistic approach towards a study of the factors affecting the effort involved in maintenance of existing software systems. It describes how one could build a systems dynamics model to predict the effort involved to maintain a software system, based on qualitative and qualitative inputs.