Maintenance cost - promoting BB & CP

From: [at]} <René>
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 12:40:43 +0100

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Hi!

As some of you may remember, I'm working for Wave Solutions for IT, the
100% software daughter of Bank Austria, Austria's largest financial
institution. All our developments are for Bank Austria only.

Currently we're having a problem with a highly parametrized (via
database) program in VB6. It is not only highly parametrized, it is also
quite complex (about 5000 lines of code, undocumented and uncommented).
The original developer was a self-employed, and all self-employeds are
not re-contracted this year, to reduce costs. So I had to take over.

The problem is: development cost about 50.000 EUR, and now we have the
second major "perfection maintenance release". The first one cost 20.000
EUR, and the second will cost 27.000 EUR.

Now, the ordering manager thinks it is unbelievable that perfecting
maintenance should cost so much, relative to the original development
cost.

I think I remember that, in fact, this is an normal situation with
complex software written in VB, and that this is, in fact, a good
argument for using CP and BB at work. That's what I told the manager.
His first question was, what could be done to better the situation. I
said, that LANGUAGE is, together with good analysis, documentation and
the KSS-rule (keep it simple and stupid), responsible to keep software
adaptable to future needs.

Now, he does not want only WORDS, he wants PROOF. Are you aware of any
research, study or statistics telling anything about complexity,
language used, documentation, development cost and maintenance cost?

This would help extremely.


Rene

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Received on Sat Feb 28 2004 - 12:40:43 UTC