Estimating Software-Intensive Systems: Projects, Products, and Processes

Chapter 6Estimating Annual Maintenance Costs

This chapter shows how to use the Linear Method to develop a simple model to estimate the annual costs for maintaining a software product. Although many parametric models address this topic, they only focus on a small part of the problem: adding, changing, and deleting lines of code from the existing product. The first section describes the maintenance process. This identifies the activities that consume effort. Subsequent sections describe how to build and calibrate the model, and to use it to update the estimates. The chapter concludes by showing how you can improve the model, and use insights from the model to reduce the maintenance costs.

6.1 The Maintenance Process

Industry often refers to “software ...