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Prolonging the life of software

Presented here are methods for successfully controlling software maintenance activity so that present systems will be more useful and less expensive to support. While it is based on experience at Los Alamos National Laboratory, it is not based on solutions developed and implemented there. Los Alamos is presently struggling with the problems identified in this paper and is impacted by them to the same extent as the rest of industry. An idea has emerged from this struggle: The deterioration of production software is basically a quality control problem the rate of which can and should be minimized. Many data processing shops currently have two options concerning old (over five years), marginally useful systems; pay the high cost of supporting them or undertake a rewrite. If the principles presented in this paper are applied, a third option may become available; prolonging the useful life of software by making it more cost-effective to support.