Software maintenance pricing method

These can have a widespread impact on the functionality of the software in general and therefore must be addressed as quickly as possible. Many times, software vendors can address issues that require corrective maintenance due to bug reports that users send in.

If a company can recognize and take care of faults before users discover them, this is an added advantage that will make your company seem more reputable and reliable no one likes an error message after all. Preventative software maintenance is looking into the future so that your software can keep working as desired for as long as possible. This includes making necessary changes, upgrades, adaptations and more.

Preventative software maintenance may address small issues which at the given time may lack significance but may turn into larger problems in the future.

As with any product on the market, once the software is released to the public, new issues and ideas come to the surface. Users may see the need for new features or requirements that they would like to see in the software to make it the best tool available for their needs.

This is when perfective software maintenance comes into play. Perfective software maintenance aims to adjust software by adding new features as necessary and removing features that are irrelevant or not effective in the given software. This process keeps software relevant as the market, and user needs, change. Adaptive software maintenance has to do with the changing technologies as well as policies and rules regarding your software.

These include operating system changes, cloud storage, hardware, etc. When these changes are performed, your software must adapt in order to properly meet new requirements and continue to run well. The software maintenance process involves various software maintenance techniques that can change according to the type of maintenance and the software maintenance plan in place. This can be user-generated or identified by the software developer itself depending on the situation and specific fault.

Analysis — The process of analyzing the suggested modification including understanding the potential effects of such a change. This step typically includes cost analysis to understand if the change is financially worthwhile. Design — Designing the new changes using requirement specifications 4. Implementation — The process of implementing the new modules by programmers. System Testing — Before being launched, the software and system must be tested.

This includes the module itself, the system and the module, and the whole system at once. Acceptance Testing- Users test the modification for acceptance. This is an important step as users can identify ongoing issues and generate recommendations for more effective implementation and changes.

Delivery — Software updates or in some cases new installation of the software. Boehm studied the various cost factors in the simple or complex public systems 1. Many researchers focused on models and different methods of cost estimation.

But what is important is to update and review each model factors. These models include analog models such as the Delphi method or estimations based on professional experience, models such as analysis of performance indicators and models of machine learning algorithms including neural networks, genetic programming, fuzzy logic, and many other models 11 , 12 , Henry Raymond in a study used the estimation techniques along with the knowledge of the project team, project manager and the president to design a predictive model for estimating the software.

This model suggests that the maintenance plays an important role in the success of IT projects. Though the effective use of technology for estimating the time and cost is necessary but is not sufficient. To predict the exact time and cost, the management needs the knowledge, knowledge integration and sharing it.

A thesis of the University of California, with the aim of improving the volume and effort estimation models for software maintenance Studies evaluation of Jyvaskyla Research Institute and University by Jussi Koskinena et al to estimate the costs of software, support modernization, repair and maintenance 5.

Taking into account the importance of software maintenance costs, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, is pursuing the following objectives in this paper:.

The scope of this study is all the software produced in the years to After sampling 40 members were selected randomly. Environments to run 14 software were Windows and 1 other one was DOS. System operational dates were from until and the operational period has been variable from 20 months to months. Current status of all systems was active, and only one of them had been disabled.

In line with the second goal to prioritize each of the factors affecting the cost of medical software maintenance the following results were obtained:.

Then six found characteristics and their measurement criteria should be estimated and finally entered into the EC application. To achieve this goal, the first measurement criteria 32 factors were determined based on the importance in the software maintenance. This questionnaire was prepared for a five-degree Likert scale and distributed among specialists in this field. After naming and ordering the information, the information was entered in the software. The list of measurement criteria and results after the interview are presented.

Ranking of the influencing factors are displayed in Table 4 with the help of EC software. Select professionals familiar with the project language and programming language.

When the COCOMO model was accurately described the use of structured programming was not like today and software tools were not much available. Nowadays use of tools, has increased and structured techniques are common. Therefore, the factors that may have initially been defined are not important anymore. So some of the factors identified by Mr. Boehm 1 such as computer memory limitations factor are outdated, but the overall coefficients of the product categories, computer, personnel and project are still fit.

Given that all HIS systems are linked in a network, computer network factor has been added. Bohemia took these factors into consideration at his time, but today with such the technology, no scholar has examined and updated these factors. In this study we updated factors extracted by Boehm. Based on interviews, 32 factors were identified in the cost estimation of medical software maintenance and were approved by informatics specialists. Using AHP model parameters, 6 groups were ranked.

Since in each research a problem is stated and examined and at the end solutions are proposed, in this study, we also provide solutions to reduce maintenance costs.

Generally we can conclude that for an accurate assessment and reduce the cost of software maintenance, software maintenance factors determining is essential. This will lead to the longer life of software. Evaluation of these factors and their influence on each of the maintenance costs, help the project manager in making decisions and planning, and is essential in the success of software maintenance.

Project managers must consider these factors for success in their projects and decisions:. For instance, there are user requirements for viewing certain data.

The team identified what tasks needed to be completed and estimated the total amount of work at 56 hours, breaking them down as follows:. But as the matter of fact, these tasks have basic functionality — creating tables in the database, storing procedures or views for selection, creating business objects, connecting them to the security module, connecting to the logging module, configuration, and so on.

At the same time, the seller, who is discussing the work on the project, has nothing to say. On the other hand, the entire volume cannot be reached in 24 hours. How to calculate software costs in such a situation? I recommend highlighting the basic functionality. This will allow the seller to behave more correctly.

By removing unnecessary features, there will still be sufficient development time. A detailed analysis of the requirements, the composition of a technical task, and a more or less clear area of work on the project occur after the signing of the contract. Demonstrations should be carried out not only for business clients but also for employees of other customer departments potentially involved in the project system administrators, key users, security service, etc.

This will allow receiving comments in the early stages, discuss problems, and allow the user to get used to the interface and functionality. Solution: we include the cost of creating documentation in the software development cost calculator.

If the project team is formed anew, there is a risk that the qualifications of one or another specialist may be lower than expected. Solution: when calculating how much does it cost to have software developed, planning tasks, and time for their implementation, it is necessary to focus on specialists at a level lower than expected to be involved in the project.

IT technologies and tasks are becoming more and more complex, which makes it more difficult to identify the pitfalls of the selected technologies at the early project stages.

IT technologies and tasks are becoming more complex. Identifying the pitfalls of selected technologies is not an easy task.

How to estimate software cost, where to start? In short:. The convenience and efficiency of these approaches lies in breaking a big picture of the project down into smaller parts and components. Thus, you get to cover the whole project scope detail by detail, step by step, without missing any little things.

Everything should stay sorted. Critical Path Analysis should take place based on the sorted out tasks. Basically, you need to go through each task and work hours attached to it and build the most critical sequence the longest path of completion. Based on that, you can make adjustments — prioritize some tasks over others, move some activities in front of others, and see where possible downtime would bring least harm. Suppose, we need to create a new software feature that requires two specialists — Developer and QA Expert — to handle full-on frontend-backend development of an asset.

Each specialist has the underlying stages to complete, including development, testing, deployment, review, etc. We take our two specialists, assign the basic tasks to them, and define how many hours each would take to complete:.

All in all, we can see that the whole scope of work involving these two specialists would take approximately 30,5 hours. Always count the longest outcome possible to have back-up hours for unexpected situations.

With this number of hours in hand, you can now easily calculate the cost of implementing an asset based on the rates you offer. If you need to analyze a much more complex and multi-sided project with many features to be implemented, use the same scheme for every separate feature and activity.

Here you got an absolutely honest algorithm for calculating the costs of developing software. As you can see, we are not hiding anything and are not trying to make money where our competitors see the main source of income.

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