software Engineering

[nse]

what is the ratio between development and maintenance???

[Narue]

The ratio of what? If it's time, I'd say for every minute you spend during development, you should expect to spend an hour on maintenance.

[nse]

yea i know but i need a professional answer, taken from a good reference coz i wanna discuss the ratio between them. am sorry but i need a specific answer without playing games.. thanx

[Narue]

I'm a professional, and that's my answer. Anything more requires benchmarks from real projects and I'm not willing to do that for you.

[nse]

i don't wanna be rude, but am not asking u to do anything for me except give me a general ratio.
by the way thanks a lot

[Narue]

There's no general ratio. If you're expecting one, you'll be waiting until somebody spends his life doing benchmarks.

[gajmp]

We have ration for document and development. but we dnt hv any ratio for development and maintenance. As per my knowledge we cant define any ratio for this.

[Ancient Dragon]

We have ration for document and development. but we dnt hv any ratio for development and maintenance. As per my knowledge we cant define any ratio for this.

And neither can anyone else. I have been developing for over 25 years and Narue is right -- if you want a rule-of-thumb, or guestimate, then 1:60 (one minute development to 1 hour maintenance) is a reasonable one. Where I work we wrote a program 5 years ago and have been maintaining it every since because the customer keeps changing requirements and updating the hardware the program runs on. Its ok for us because we made tons of money on it and continue to do so every time the customer adds new requirements of changes existing ones, but that beside the point.

[gajmp]

if we spend this much time for maintenance then when will develope new product...

[Ezzaral]

Narue and Ancient Dragon are correct. There is not a simple ratio. No developer can tell you that x minutes development results in y minutes maintenance. It just doesn't work that way. You say that you have a ratio for documentation to development. I would be skeptical of that as well. Real world development just does not work based upon such clearly defined ratios and any project is going to vary greatly. Such ratios are really only useful to people wanting to sell books on design methodologies and are often worth less than the paper upon which they are printed.

[Ancient Dragon]

if we spend this much time for maintenance then when will develope new product...

software companies hire more programmers and is one reason for such a high demand for programmers. And is a reason for compiler writers such as Microsoft to invest a lot of $$$ in R&D (Research and Development) of new and improved IDE and compilers. Finally it is a reason for the huge demand for 3d party libraries and toolboxes -- to reduce program maintenance time and costs.

[Killer_Typo]

There's no general ratio. If you're expecting one, you'll be waiting until somebody spends his life doing benchmarks.

so true, the client i work for is constantly asking for well if it is going to x ammount of time to develop this how long do you think it will take to maintain/debug etc...

it's hard to tell him that no project can really ever be complete because you will probably be maintaining it for a long time :lol:

i love doing it though so i dont mind, and the pay is great so yay for meeeee :D