Steering the maintenance costs: an exploration of the maintenance construct

Maintenance is a natural and necessary part of the system life-cycle and its costs. It is important to control where time and money are spent and what kind of maintenance is performed. Systems maintenance personnel must keep their eye on the potential uses of information technology for competitive purposes in order to classify existing systems projects. For this purpose it is necessary to be able to measure both maintenance, the efforts and costs, and the quality factor maintainability. Such measuring facilitates planning and steering the maintenance work in information systems organizations. The authors present a framework for evaluating software quality in organizations. They combine structure, readability, size, numbers of errors and complexity metrics, and some process attribute metrics to measure maintainability. The collected values are stored in a metric database, from where periodic reports are written. Availability to measurements offers means for the organization to distribute their information systems resources to more profitable objects and to be in control of the maintenance costs, i.e. coordination and reuse of the newly found resources