Software Maintenance Productivity Factors

 

Estimates from IBM, Gartner, Forrester and others put the cost of software maintenance at around 80% of the total lifetime cost of software applications.

 

IT managers serve their companies well when they apply proven engineering practices to increase productivity, improve quality and lower costs of their maintenance work.

 

In his encyclopedic book examining over 12,000 software projects and their critical success and failure factors, Applied Software Measurement: Global Analysis of Productivity and Quality, long-time software metrics guru Capers Jones provides some insightful numbers from his analyses of maintenance productivity and quality.

 

The following table shows factors that positively impact maintenance productivity, and factors that negatively impact maintenance productivity.

 

 

Like many such analyses, some of the good and bad factors are just the flip side of each other, but here is what stands out and should be heeded by the thoughtful IT manager:

 

The dominant factors that affect maintenance productivity, costs and quality, both good and bad, are related to the complexity and quality of the code, and the tools available to deal with them.

 

Databorough Solutions To Increase Your Productivity, Improve Quality and Lower your Costs

Here is another view of that table highlighting the relevant factors, and the solutions that Databorough delivers to directly address those factors.

 

 

How can you start achieving these kinds of improvements in productivity, quality and cost?

 

Very simply, you need better information for management and better information for programming.

 

Databorough supplies three essential tools to improve productivity and quality for maintenance operations that directly address the above statistics as found in over 12,000 software projects:

 

X-Analysis – An application cross reference and static analysis tool that enables managers, systems analysts and programmers to rapidly and thoroughly research existing applications in support of application enhancement, debugging and documentation tasks.

 

X-Audit – A source code and object analysis system that provides metrics, alerts and time series comparisons of the state of your application to enable you to focus attention on the areas of your system most in need of correction, improvement or attention.

 

X-Redo and X-Migrate – A reengineering tool that modernizes complex, monolithic RPG code by restructuring it into MVC-OO patterns for dramatically improved maintainability, and also converts it to Java or C# if that is the goal.

With this information available you can begin to answer some truly important questions: