A software maintenance survey

We have conducted a survey of the state of software maintenance in Hong Kong, as the software industry in Hong Kong and south China is expanding. The survey instrument is derived from the previous work of Lientz and Swanson (1981) and Dekleva (1992). We sent out about 1000 questionnaires and received about 5% replies. Our results indicate that, in Hong Kong, about 66% of the total software life cycle cost is spent on software maintenance. The average application system is about 5 years old, consisting of 577 programs and 308000 lines of code. Making enhancements appears to be the most costly group of maintenance work (38% of all maintenance work undertaken), followed by error correction (16%). The most often cited problems in software maintenance are staff turnover, poor documentation and changing user requirements