Productivity Model of Software Maintenance Projects

From Information Systems at Pitt Business

Hedonic Model of Network ExternalitiesEven though the cost for unit of computing power has been steadily decreasing, the budget cost for an IS department has increased at an increasing rate with each passing year. This has been attributed to the increased complexity of increasing maintenance costs. Thus it is important to understand how to improve the productivity of maintenance projects of systems. By identifying factors under managerial control, organizations would be better equipped to decrease costs and increase benefits to the organization.

This paper develops a model to estimate the production frontier for maintenance projects. By utilizing the stochastic data envelopment analysis methodology, the model is able to estimate the frontier while simultaneously estimating for factors that estimate the frontier, along with random effects due to measurement errors. The paper then provides estimates of each factor based on data from 65 software projects.

[edit] Abstract

The cost of maintaining application software has been rapidly escalating, and is currently estimated to comprise from 50-80% of corporate information systems department budgets. In this research we develop an estimable production frontier model of software maintenance, using a new methodology that allows the simultaneous estimation of both the production frontier and the effects of several productivity factors. Our model allows deviations on both sides of the estimated frontier to reflect the impact of both production inefficiencies and random effects such as measurement errors. The model is then estimated using an empirical dataset of 65 software maintenance projects from a large commercial bank. The insights obtained from the estimation results are found to be quite consistent for reasonable variations in the specification of the model. Estimates of the marginal impacts of all of the included productivity factors are obtained to aid managers in improving productivity in software maintenance.

[edit] Paper Information

Authors: Rajiv Banker, Srikant Datar, Chris Kemerer

Check out this paper at A Model to Evaluate Variables Impacting the Productivity of Software Maintenance Projects

This paper was originally published in Management Science, Vol 37, Num 1, 1991.

[edit] Keywords

Software maintenance, systems development lifecycle, productivity, data envelopment analysis