Reducing Software Maintenance and Total Ownership Costs

May 22, 2008 · Filed Under Conferences  - 0 Comment(s)

Over 75% of the costs of software are in software maintenance. To address this I (Dan Galorath) participated in a best practices conference held by the IT Metrics & productivity Institute. I was fascinated by Herb Krasner’s presentation on software evolution versus software maintenance.

 

Herb defined software evolution as the set of activities, both technical and managerial, that ensures that software continues to meet organizational and business objectives in a cost effective way. He further defines evolutionary system types as either having an Imprecise statement of a real-world problem which generally changes over time or a system that becomes part of the world that it models/implement whose acceptance depends entirely on opinion and judgment. Evolutionary is in contrast with a maintenance system where the problem can be completely stated and where a change to the specification defines a new problem and a new system.

 

Herb Krasner , David Garmus, and Dan Galorath talks all illustrated how the use of metrics and management associated with measurement through both development and maintenance can reduce total ownership costs dramatically.

 

We then heard from Bob Lawhorn who spoke on how his company, Computer Aid Inc (CAI) actually saves organizations money and increases quality by taking over legacy system maintenance and support. It was one of the most inspiring illustrations on why we should do all this I ever saw. He spoke of taking over these systems with new hires, applying the CAI processes and measurement and reducing customer costs by around 30%. And they have been doing this for over 20 years.

 

Overall I came away inspired, seeing how software estimation, measurement, process, and real management of software like manufacturing is making a difference.

 

I will be presenting my talk on reducing total ownership costs several more times this year in partnership with CAI.


Thank you for reading “Dan on Estimating”, if you would like more information about Galorath’s estimation models, please visit our contact page or call us at +1 310 414-3222.

Related posts:

  1. Software Measurement and Total Ownership Costs… Dan’s Presentation at the NYC SPIN I had the opportunity to present at the New York City SPIN http://www.nycspin.org last week.  The topics included software measurement,...
  2. Establishing the ROI on Software Through Examination of Total Ownership Costs I get so excited when an organization does a true business case and evaluates cost versus benefits of a software...
  3. Government IT Project Woes and Estimating Total Ownership Costs A recent government report showed 81% of budget or $57 billion in IT projects in danger of failing. Detailed reports...
  4. Software Maintenance: Costly And Controllable It always amazes me when I hear someone say they can estimate software maintenance just by taking a factor of...
  5. The Total Ownership Cost of IT Systems It is interesting to see how the much of the industry speaks of IT system cost problems while ignoring a...

Comments

Leave a Reply




CommentLuv badge