Software maintenance in Hong Kong

In order to find out the state of software maintenance in Hong Kong, we have conducted a questionnaire survey, supplemented by telephone interviews and industrial visits. Our results indicate that, in Hong Kong, about 66% of the total software life cycle cost is spent on software maintenance. The average application system is about 5.1 years old, consisting of 577 programs and 308,000 lines of code. The most often cited problems in software maintenance are staff turnover, poor documentation and changing user requirements. We also observed that software maintenance work has not been given proper recognition. This paper attempts to contrast our survey findings with that of a similar survey conducted in USA. We also present some initial results of a series of experiments to compare OO with 4GL and conventional development approaches