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Characteristics of application software maintenance

Published: 01 June 1978 Publication History

Abstract

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.

References

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Boehm, B.W. The high cost of software. Proc Symp on High Cost of Software, Monterey, Calif., 1973, pp. 27--40.
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Boehm, B.W., Brown, J.R., and Lipow, M. Quantitative evaluation of software quality. Proc. 2nd Int. Conf. on Software Eng., Oct. 1976, pp. 592-605.
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Published In

cover image Communications of the ACM
Communications of the ACM  Volume 21, Issue 6
June 1978
75 pages
ISSN:0001-0782
EISSN:1557-7317
DOI:10.1145/359511
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 June 1978
Published in CACM Volume 21, Issue 6

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  1. management and technical issues
  2. software maintenance
  3. use of productivity aids

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  • (2024)Exploring the Connection between the TDD Practice and Test Smells—A Systematic Literature ReviewComputers10.3390/computers1303007913:3(79)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2024
  • (2024)A Meta-Study of Software-Change IntentionsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/3661484Online publication date: 25-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Characterizing Software Maintenance Meetings: Information Shared, Discussion Outcomes, and Information CapturedProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3623330(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
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