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Software maintenance includes activities such as enhancements, defect fixes, incident handling that are involved in maintenance and adaption of the software (Geraci et al., 1991). Software maintenance starts once the application is in production to ensure the highest availability and performance of the running applications.
The main software maintenance types are adaptive, corrective, preventive and perfective (Harrison, 1990) During the software lifecycle, more than half of the lifetime cost will be spent in software maintenance (Lientz, 1980). The research from Schach et al. finds that more than 18% of project effort is spent in adaptive maintenance (Schach et al., 2002).
The paper proposes a novel estimation method, digital project maintenance estimation framework for enhancements and maintenance projects that factors in various activities in maintenance phase. The enhancement and maintenance activities are categorized into four main categories: incident management, enhancement management, regular maintenance activities and quality enhancement activities consisting of activities that belong to each of the categories.
The digital project maintenance estimation framework provides the estimation guidelines, complexity definition scale and effort calculation formulae for all the categories such as incident management, enhancements, regular maintenance and quality enhancements. The project teams can compile the historical data and apply the Digital project maintenance estimation framework to predict the maintenance effort.