Characteristics of application software maintenance

Maintenance and enhancement of application software consume a major portion of the total life cycle cost of a system. Rough estimates of the total systems and programming resources consumed range as high as 75-80 percent in each category. However, the area has been given little attention in the literature. To analyze the problems in this area a questionnaire was developed and pretested. It was then submitted to 120 organizations. Respondents totaled 69. Responses were analyzed with the SPSS statistical package. The results of the analysis indicate that: (1) maintenance and enhancement do consume much of the total resources of systems and programming groups; (2) maintenance and enhancement tend to be viewed by management as at least somewhat more important than new application software development; (3) in maintenance and enhancement, problems of a management orientation tend to be more significant than those of a technical orientation; and (4) user demands for enhancements and extension constitute the most important management problem area.

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