Lessons Learned from the ISBSG Maintenance & Support Dataset
by Arlene MinkieWicz (Unison)
It is generally believed that the effort associated with software maintenance activities represents somewhere between 65 and 85 percent of an application’s total ownership cost.
Despite this fact, if one were to peruse recent research, it would quickly become obvious that there are very few studies focused on this topic. Not to say there have been none: in recent years, the US Department of Defense has put considerable effort into studying this for their software systems, but beyond that very little seems to have be available.
This study focuses on the International Benchmark Standards Group’s Maintenance and Support (ISBSG M&S – Release 7 2020) dataset. The focus of the study is to identify maintenance trends and likely effort drivers aligned to the various activities considered to be part of the overall maintenance activity. Results will be stratified to apply to specific industries, application types and programming languages as appropriate.
See a pdf of Arlene’s presentation.
About Arlene Minkiewicz
Arlene is the Chief Scientist at Unison Cost Engineering. She is responsible for the creation and maintenance of intellectual property relating to all of Unison’s suite of cost estimating models.
