An Empirical Study of Factors and their Relationships in Outsourced Software Maintenance

IT outsourcing, which commenced as a cost reduction operation, has now become an essential parameter for measuring the operational efficiency of an organization. An increasing number of operational IT systems are moving into the maintenance phase, becoming potential candidates for outsourcing. Human and organizational factors, typical to maintenance activities, such as organization climate, customer attitude, engineers´ attitude, etc., have a significant influence on software maintenance effort and make the task of effort estimation complex. In this paper we present the results of an empirical study, carried out to identify and study the influence of such factors on software maintenance effort.