Software maintenance is an important part of the software development
activity, but it is also the less discussed. A recent poll seems to
show that the part of maintenance in software development budget is
going down. Why?
Question: what percentage of your software development budget is
devoted to maintenance. Maintenance is defined as process of
correcting, enhancing and optimising deployed software.
25% or less of the budget ...........37%
26% to 50% of the budget ............27%
51% to 75% of the budget ............24%
more than 75% of the budget .........12%
Number of participants: 433
The annual maintenance costs in the US are estimated at over $ 70
billion. According to the different studies produced in the last
century, maintenance should cost between 66% and 90% of the total life
cycle costs. We can see in our survey that the majority of the
participants estimate their maintenance budget below the 50%
threshold. If we accept that these numbers are representative of a
modified situation, many hypothesis can be made to explain it.
Go to
http://www.methodsandtools.com/dynpo...hp?Maintenance
to see these reasons and get more resources on software maintenance.
A Trend Towards Lower Software Maintenance Budgets? 
