A longitudinal study of development and maintenance in Norway: Report from the 2003 investigation

The amount of work on application systems being taken up by maintenance activities (work done on an IT-system after being put in production) has been one of the arguments of those speaking about a ‘software crisis’. We have earlier investigated the applicability of this notion, and propose to rather look at the percentage of work being done on application portfolio upkeep (work made to keep up the functional coverage of the application system portfolio of the organization. This also includes the development of replacement systems), to assess the efficiency of the application systems support in an organisation. This paper presents the main results of a survey investigation performed in 2003 in 54 Norwegian organisations within this area. The amount of application portfolio upkeep is significantly higher than in a similar investigation conducted in 1993. The level of maintenance is smaller (although not significantly) than in another similar investigation conducted in 1998. There was a significant increase in both maintenance and application portfolio upkeep from 1993 to 1998, which could partly be attributed to be the extra maintenance and replacement-oriented work necessary to deal with the ‘year 2000 problem.’ As for the 2003 investigation, the slow IT-market in general seems to have influenced the results negatively seen from the point of view of application systems support efficiency in organization.