Software Maintenance: From the Perspective of Effort and Cost Requirement

Software and software deliverables have high impact on all fields. Once software is deployed, it has to be maintained continuously, till it becomes obsolete. Various activities that come under maintenance include adaptive, corrective, and predictive maintenance. Even though software maintenance is not tagged as a core field in software engineering compared to other software-related activities, almost 70 % of time and resources are allotted for maintenance activities. According to the related work, very little research is going on in the field of maintenance and this article highlights the scope of maintenance-related research. Identifying the factors that directly and indirectly affect the maintenance activity will in turn make the estimation activities easy. Implementation of an effective software maintenance model will have a very high impact in the quality of software and thereby with customer satisfaction. This article aims to project an effective maintenance model which reduces cost of rework and improves customer satisfaction index.