Total Cost of Ownership: Development is (only) Job One
Planning software development projects is never an easy undertaking. Customer and competitive requirements, time-to-market, architectural and quality considerations, staffing levels and expertise, potential risks, and many other factors must be carefully weighed and considered. What can make software planning even more complicated, however, is that software development costs only comprise a portion – often the smaller portion – of the total cost of software ownership. In fact, the development process, itself, invariably has a significant impact on total cost of ownership as tradeoffs are evaluated and compromises made which impact software sustainability and maintainability of software over time.
Because software doesn’t wear out like car tires do, software planners may underestimate how much a code stream can degrade over time with the accumulation of patches, system and configuration changes, provisioning and re-provisioning, integrations, and ongoing development. Further, the rigorous standards applied during initial software development may end up being compromised as maintenance personnel are diverted to emerging or mission-critical software issues. Over time, accumulation of poorly managed changes almost always generates software instability and a significant increase in the cost of software maintenance – up to four times the cost of initial development, according to some estimates.
This session will provide a systematic approach to addressing total cost of ownership across the software lifecycle, including design for maintainability, development of measurement criteria, collection of metrics, and industry standards, guidelines, and best practice options. Parametric modeling will be discussed using the SEER platform as a specific example of this approach. Estimating block changes and their potential interdependencies and impacts will also be covered.
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