If maintenance is such a large portion of the TCO for a software application, then why don’t organizations spend the additional one-time upfront investment required to reduce ongoing maintenance costs? The answer varies from organization to organization, but the most common reasons that we have heard include:

1. Cost and time pressures
2. Lack of ROI argument
3. Short life expectations of the software (i.e. temporary solution)
4. Regarded as less interesting than developing the next application

The fact is that the cost, time and ROI argument can be easily addressed by gaining an understanding of total cost of the software over its lifecycle. Consider this example. To stick to round numbers, let’s assume that the total lifecycle cost of the software is $1 million. Based on industry surveys, we know that between 60-80% of this cost is related to maintenance, while between 20-40% of the cost is related to the initial development effort.

The maintenance activities can be broken down by four sub-categories as follows:

If we can reduce the maintenance effort by 20%, which should be easily possible by adding some upfront efforts in areas like documentation, testing, focus groups and building administrative functionality, then we will reduce the TCO by 12-16%. This implies that we can afford to spend an additional development cost of between $120,000 to $160,000 or less to help reduce the total cost of ownership of the software over its lifecycle.

Why is it important? Improving software maintainability will enable the organization to provide better service, adapt to changing needs of the users and the environment as well as decrease the time to fix a defect when identified.

Interestingly, this is exactly how software product development companies design and develop their products. The product development processes enable software product companies to build the application with customization, adaptability and enhancements in mind. If we could adapt some of the best practices around software product development when building internal custom software, then we could see a sizable decrease in TCO over the software lifecycle. We need to bring the product mindset to the custom development teams in our organizations! ME