How much money do you spend fixing your software instead of improving it?
Medium to large companies have software in significant amounts. Some of these software estates exceed well over 1,000,000 function points in the total volume of their corporate software portfolios.
Much of this software is now over 10 years old, and some applications are even over 25 years old. Maintenance of aging software tends to become increasingly difficult year by year, since updates gradually destroy the original structure of the applications constructing layers of new technologies around the original core software system.
We can see that software systems become hard to maintain over time, while every day more and more software is being produced. The cost of software maintenance is rising dramatically and it has been estimated that nowadays software maintenance accounts for more than 90% of the total cost of software, whereas it was around 50% a couple of decades ago.
The management of application maintenance has become a problem mainly due to the high complexity of today’s applications where several layers of different technologies work together to provide the business functionality. In this scenario, companies have inherited a number of maintenance issues that complicate the maintenance
- Understanding the applications complexity (it can account up to 50% of total maintenance costs)
- Lack of documentation of the applications
- Lack of traceability of requirements
- The dispersion of changed code
- The rotation of developers
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You need to be flexible and fast managing the maintenance of your applications. The business cannot wait for you to understand what is going on with an obscure issue in the code. What can you do to effectively manage your maintenance tasks and reduce cost?
3 main aspects to focus on
- Untangle the complexity of your applications. This will lead you to understand faster what you have to do when assessing a maintenance problem. It will help you to re-document your application. It will most probably give you information to reduce that complexity by eliminating redundant code or obsolete code.
- Detect possible problems in the development phase. Many of the problems that are fixed during the maintenance of an application could be detected in the development phase when they are easier and cheaper to fix. This can account up to 85% of the bugs according to different experts and our experience.
- Having a quality assurance process that focuses on the maintainability of the applications. It will give you a holistic view on how maintainable is your application taking into account the code, the documentation, the traceability of requirements, the technical and functional tests.
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Optimyth provides a complete solution to effectively manage the maintenance of your applications and help you reduce its cost.
Related products: checKingQA and checKingAIM
How much money do you spend fixing your software instead of improving it?
How we do it
Our application maintenance management solution allows you to build the complete software map of your applications automatically. Untangle the complexity and provide the capability of running automatic impact analysis helping you to focus only on the components of the application affected by a change. You can automatically find obsolete components that can be removed from your application. Redundant components and functionality is automatically discovered as well so the application can be re-engineered to reduce the complexity.
Optimyth’s application maintenance management solution goes beyond allowing you to establish a quality assurance process that, in one hand, will help you detect possible software bugs in the development phase by applying rules on the code itself highlighting buggy patterns. And, on the other hand, it will measure and certify the maintainability of the application on all the development phases. We use different maintainability indicators like the one defined by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI); or Optimyth’s own maintainability indicator that enhances the SEI one.
One of the metrics we use to calculate different quality indicators, maintainability in particular, is the complexity of the application code itself, so you will have the necessary information to understand and reduce the complexity of your application at 3 levels: application inter-dependencies, application components dependencies and code intrinsic complexity.
The solution can integrate information from third party systems to have the traceability of the requirements from their definition thru the implementation and all the way to the related test cases. Having this information centralized has a huge impact to shorten maintenance time.
By managing the maintenance of your applications with Optimyth’s solution you get immediate benefits. Starting with the one that probably drive the rest: reduce the cost and going on reducing the number of issues in the production environments, having better alignment with business needs, having faster response to technology requirements, increasing the value of customer deliverables, enabling faster time to market.
And if all this is not enough you will increase your customer satisfaction.
So, your customers are waiting for you to finish your latest maintenance cycle. What are you waiting for?
Related products: checKingQA and checKingAIM