If You Build It ...
Mellon's Woods says that, for those who opt to build versus buy, maintenance is also a reflection of how well a firm develops its software at the initial stages. To guide it on that front, Mellon has adopted the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model, a five-step framework for measuring and improving an organization's software development, for developing applications. Woods notes that when you have fewer bugs, there are fewer issues downstream. "The model really leads you through best practices for developing software. Among other things, it's a cleaner system that requires less maintenance," he says.
Ameritrade's Hirji adds that broken applications are one of the maintenance sticking points, especially with the number of security patches that some software developers issue. Each patch can cause a malfunction somewhere in the system. The challenge, he says, "is in managing and removing the complexity. The more complex an environment is, the higher the maintenance is going to be. We try to take out as much of the complexity as we can. We don't have monster monolithic applications."
Maintenance Mends
Experts say there are a few things that firms can do now to cut their maintenance costs.
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