A Novel Approach to Manage IT Application Maintenance Projects

Software Cybernetics is the field of science concerned with processes of communication and control in software systems. It makes better use of the interplay between control theory/engineering and software engineering. There is a consensus that application maintenance takes up the majority of the effort in the life cycle of the application software and the percentage of efforts spent on maintenance has increased over the years. Driven by the factors like continuous pressure to reduce cost of maintenance year after year and increased intention of the companies to focus on core competencies, large companies across the world are outsourcing the maintenance of the application software to IT vendors. The IT vendors allocate the resources based on previous experience and common sense. In this research, we have introduced Software Cybernetics to control resource allocation in the Software Maintenance Projects which are executed by the IT vendors.