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Did you know that maintenance costs account for 50% to 80% of the total product? Well, ha! And while most project managers are pretty good sizing new product features, many are arguing in the estimation of the effort to find the product as it will be generally available terrible. As are result, maintenance projects is not busy enough, companies are not able to respond quickly to customer requests and products never reach back.

This paper presents a method forHelp plan and then guesstimate for the maintenance phase of the products generally available. But first, let us define some terms that are important to understand this article.

Maintenance

Maintenance is connected as the cost to fix defects in a software-defined for general availability (GA). In other words, how many person-months it will take your organization to correct errors discovered by your customers in the area?

Maintenance candivided into three sub-categories.

Corrective maintenance involves fixing errors that are discovered after the system is available to the public. An example of corrective maintenance activities is a developer to set a Java method that causes a compilation error.

Adaptive maintenance involves changing the system in a different environment, like a different network topology, platform or operating system. An example of adaptive maintenance activities is a developerImposition of a Java method that works on BEA WebLogic, but not on IBM Websphere.

Perfective maintenance includes changes that meet the software, the same requirements, but to allow in a reasonable manner. For example, the designer might change some code just to keep the system more efficient and easier.

Improvements

Extensions that are known as change requests, as the effort by adding new functionality to a software system or associated definedresponse to changes of a software system just defined non-functional requirements.

Imagine an application that requires users to authenticate using a username and password. Pretty standard stuff, right? Maybe, but some customers may want to add third credential mechanism as a domain password. Others want the user to have an e-mail patterns. Finally, others may want the application to remember the user credentials of the meetings, soAuthenticate the user automatically.

Support

The support is the sum of maintenance and expansion efforts after the product is defined, implemented GA. In other words, for all activities that occur generally available for a product said.

Methodology

Early in my career, I realized that the thumb could be applied to a simple rule to estimate the costs to support certain projects. For example, the annual cost of supporting a staticWeb site after it goes live, is more or less equivalent to the cost of developing IT. In other words, if the development of a static website costs $ 10,000, you can expect to take care to spend $ 10,000 a year.

The understanding of these standards is very practical. Unfortunately, few of them are transferable. In other words, the same rule is not activated for an e-commerce dynamic site distributed on 3 floors.

Various models have been developed over the years to provide maintenanceCosts for the lack of density (eg, Raleigh curves, the Weibull analysis is based) and Kasi Kloc and development efforts. Unfortunately, these models are not flawless either. Many of them are either very vague or too complicated to bother learning them. In fact, some so complex that you purchase an application worth thousands of dollars and will give you 100 + parameters to calculate the efforts that are needed in order to obtain the product.

After studyingmore than a dozen forecasting models, there is a method that strongly recommend any beginner or experienced project manager.

Model Boehm

Boehm model is widely accepted in industry as a valuable model for the prediction of maintenance costs. It 's relatively easy to understand and, importantly, it allows to refine the forecasts because of the cost multipliers, which are explained later in this article.

Boehm formula is as follows:

AME X = ACTSDT, where

AME is the annual maintenance effort measured in person months
ACT is the annual change in traffic that a fraction of a source of software product declarations that change during a typical year is the addition or modification
SDT is the software development during the period of person-months

Tell a software project requires 100 person-months of development, and has been estimated that 15% of code in a typical year would be changed. The annualestimated maintenance costs (AME) is:

AME = 0.15 x 100 = 15 per person / month

In other words, you should plan to keep expenses to 15 person-months per year on this particular project software spend.

The estimated annual cost of basic maintenance can be refined by assessing the importance of different factors and that the cost and selection of leverage costs. The cost of basic maintenance is then multiplied by each cost multiplier to changean estimate of maintenance costs.

Saying the current system of factors that most influence on maintenance costs were the complexity of the product (CPLX), which was very high, and the availability of support staff with experience of application (AEXP), which was very low .

If CPLX AEXP = 1.30 and = 1.29, then:

AEM = 15 x 1.30 x 1.29 = 25.2 per person / month

Forecast Improvements

Maintenance costs reviewed here the impact of cost multipliers, butdoes not contain product enhancements, known as change requests.

The bad news is that the prediction extensions is extremely difficult because you know in advance that additional features your future customer demand is needed. The good news is that your customers all the improvements they need for free. The result is a good organization is not considered to represent extensions of a cost, but rather a source of incremental samplesRevenue.

Completion

As an estimate of the costs of maintaining a product that is generally available, follow this advice:

Learn and use this (simplified) version of the Boehm model to predict maintenance costs.
Track your SDT.
Measure your ACT.
Define cost multipliers refine your forecast.

Also, make sure you have a team of professional service is required to implement change requests from customers but do not treat them as an expense as they are in facta source of income.

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