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Overview
Customers are demanding enhanced products with more features at a lower cost. It is becoming clear for product companies that developing new products to meet the ever-changing market requirements is neither viable nor does it make good business sense. With the competition increasing and the products getting out-dated at a faster pace, companies are looking at alternatives by which they can upgrade their solutions faster and in a more cost effective manner. Sustaining products has become a very critical activity for most vendors now.
Sustained engineering is the process of enhancing and optimizing deployed software (software release), as well as remedying defects. This is one of the phases of SDLC and involves changes to the software in order to correct defects and deficiencies found during field usage as well as the addition of new functionality to improve the software's usability and applicability. In today's world in software development, only 20% of all maintenance work is spent in fixing faults whereas the remaining 80% is spent in implementing the changes identified. |
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IDC expects software maintenance revenue to grow at a 9.6% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to reach $137 billion by 2010 |
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- IDC Report |
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Categories of Sustenance Activities
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Types |
Details |
Percentage |
Corrective |
- Fixing a problem or defect
- System does not function the way it is designed to be
- Defect can occur due to design, logic or coding errors
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Account for 20% of all sustenance activities |
Adaptive |
- Modifications to adapt to changes in the environment
- Changes could be due to business rules, workflow, software and hardware platforms etc...
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Account for 25% of all sustenance activities |
Perfective |
- Enhancements to improve functionality and/or performance
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Accounts for almost 50% of all sustenance activities |
Preventive |
- Proactively change the code to prevent problems/defects in future
- Addressing the problems to improve its future maintainability
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This is rare and accounts for only 5% |
Sustenance Efforts: Fast Facts
Based on a survey conducted by Lientz and Swanson, the following are highlights of the sustenance engineering efforts undertaken by companies;
- The cost of sustenance is over 50% of the total lifecycle costs of a software product
- Distribution of effort in sustained engineering
- 12.4% is emergency debugging
- 9.3% is routine debugging
- 17.3% is data environment adaptation
- 6.2% is due to changes to hardware, OS
- 41.8% is enhancements for users
- 5.5% is to improve documentation
- 4.0% is to improve code efficiency
- 3.4% is other
Aztecsoft Expertise
Aztecsoft offers a rapid and thorough sustained engineering solution. With broad expertise in web applications, Internet middleware and database technologies, Aztecsoft offers a remarkably powerful sustenance model that features strongly motivated engineering teams working both onsite and offsite.
Aztecsoft's rich sustained engineering offering is specifically designed to help companies improve the effectiveness of their maintenance function -- at a lower cost. These services help companies cut back on their sustenance services efforts and address/focus on critical issues like developing new products and solutions.
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