Maintenance and Changes

The cost of maintaining and enhancing an application can be 5 times or more of the initial costs of development and implementation.  This has been known for many decades.  Lowering maintenance and enhancement costs has been a topic of much discussion, literature, and research for just as long.  There are many good ideas and best practices on this subject, but for our purposes we would like to make some simple observations.  In order to develop working skills in this area a development team has to have the following:

1. They must be aware that software maintainability and enhancement is a priority and have a knowledge base to draw on
2. They must architect the software for the long term and learn from key architectural decisions
3. They must work within an environment that rewards building maintainable and extendable software.

Providing these elements to a software team takes additional time and money and a long term commitment.  The benefits are not realized until years later.  So in order to provide these elements it must be in the business's interest to invest in them.  For most contractors and consultants this is generally not the case.

The difficulty in providing an incentive to build maintainable software is one of the major reasons why DJiNN has built our company around long term relationships with our clients.  In order to give software maintainability the focus is deserves it must be in our interest to do so.  We do this by:

• Spending our sales and marketing dollars providing value added services at NO EXTRA COST to help our existing clients grow, rather then gaining new clients and losing old ones
• Measuring our success as a company by improving the amount of business functionality we can add or change in existing software per dollar, rather then assuming all development starts from scratch. This is one of our key performance indicator and we measure, manage and improve this constantly
• Taking a long term view to our relationship - Working with you year after year and keeping the same team on your software

By deliberately modeling our business to be accountable for maintenance and changes we avoid the inherent conflict of interest that drives consulting and system integration companies to build software as fast and as cheaply as possible, pushing larger (and for the most part undefined) costs into the future and making long term maintainability cost prohibitive for you and more profitable for them.