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.

Description: Maintenance Cost Chart

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