On the distinction between functional development and functional maintenance
John Krogstie · Journal of Software Maintenance Research and Practice · 1995
Abstract The large amount of work on information systems being taken up by maintenance activities has been one of the arguments of those announcing a ‘software crisis’. In this article we have investigated the applicability of this statement, and propose instead to look at the percentage of work being done on functional maintenance to assess the efficiency of the information system support in an organization, seen from the end‐user's point of view. A survey with results from 52 Norwegian organizations on development and maintenance of information systems has been performed, and some of the results are presented in the article. These are compared with results from similar investigations acting as calibration for our more novel results on functional development and maintenance. This is the first time to our knowledge that figures for functional maintenance have been investigated in a survey. From a functional point of view, the situation is better than previously perceived. Still, almost 45% of the work being done on computerized information systems in organizations is functional maintenance, i.e. not improving the information system support of the organization functionally. The amount of functional maintenance appears to be negatively correlated with the size measures for the organization, and with organizations having a well‐developed maintenance and development methodology, although further investigations should be performed to uncover the mechanisms of functional maintenance.