Anticlue

Software Maintenance

When one is building software, one really needs to consider future enhancements and maintenance. The truth of the matter is that there will be corporate plans for a hardware refresh, but not a lot of corporations go through a software application refresh with the same regularity or vigor.

The cost of maintaining any developed software package will consume a large portion of the costs. From Robert Glass’s Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering, maintenance typically consumes 40 to 80 percent of software costs and enhancements to the application represent roughly 60 percent of maintenance.

The need for maintenance to a product is just one of those things in life it is better to embrace, rather than forget. As time changes, the business process using the software will change, and that will require software changes. Maintenance, enhancements to, or exploitation of, an application will occur.

And when that does happen, the biggest step to overcome is understanding how the existing product functions. Everyone can remember a time or two during their tenure in the computer industry, when suddenly they were asked to support an application with little or no familiarity.

This is why it is essential that organizations and management buy-in to giving developers time to standardize practices. It will be a small investment in the beginning when compare to the maintenance cost of any application.

This is also why it is important to consider the whole programming team of an organization. It is better to have several cross trained resources, than several individualized specialists in different programming techniques.