Cost of Maintenance
Reports
suggest that the cost of maintenance is high. A study on estimating software
maintenance found that the cost of maintenance is as high as 67% of the cost of
entire software process cycle.
On
an average, the cost of software maintenance is more than 50% of all SDLC
phases. There are various factors, which trigger maintenance cost go high, such
as:
Real-world factors affecting Maintenance Cost
● The
standard age of any software is considered up to 10 to 15 years.
● Older softwares, which were meant to work on slow machines with
less memory and storage capacity cannot keep themselves challenging against
newly coming enhanced softwares on modern
hardware.
● As
technology advances, it becomes costly to maintain old software.
● Most
maintenance engineers are newbie and use trial and error method to rectify
problem.
● Often,
changes made can easily hurt the original structure of the software, making it
hard for any subsequent changes.
● Changes
are often left undocumented which may cause more conflicts in future.
Software-end factors affecting Maintenance Cost
● Structure
of Software Program
● Programming
Language
● Dependence
on external environment
● Staff
reliability and availability