Factors Affecting Maintenance Efficiency of Custom Made Software

Abstract

This paper aims to clarify factors related to software maintenance efficiency, to suppress maintenance cost of a user company. We defined maintenance amount per engineer (the number of maintained programs / the number of engineers) as maintenance efficiency, and analyzed the cross-company dataset of software maintenance collected by the Economic Research Association. A multiple regression analysis showed that the status of maintenance process standardization is the factor which can be controlled by the user and has relationship to maintenance efficiency. Maintenance process standardization is expected to make maintenance efficiency about 8 times better (at least about 2 times better, and at most about 35 times better).