Many organizations conduct Maintenance & Support activities. This includes: incident management, problem management, queries & quick services, and user support. Prevention of certain issues is preferable (and more cost effective), however some of these activities are unavoidable.
The cost of Maintenance and Support is often substantial. In many cases, these activities account for over 80% of the total project lifecycle costs (i.e. from the start of development to the termination of an application). Many organizations wonder if they can perform Maintenance and Support activities with fewer people and therefore less expense.
In the ISBSG repository: Maintenance and Support, effort spent per category and other characteristics of over 1900 applications is available for analysis.
For more information, please see the short paper – Analysis of Maintenance and Support Productivity. or learn more about ISBSG Data subscriptions
