The Effect of Software Quality Assurance Function on Software Maintenance Cost

Abstract

Software maintenance is becoming the most expensive part of the software life cycle. This study attempts to examine the following research questions: 1. Does the SQA function have any impact on software maintenance cost reduction? 2. In which systems development phase does the SQA effort have the greatest impact on the reduction of software maintenance cost? Software quality assurance function's performing review in an early software development phase in theorized in this paper to be effective for reducing maintenance cost. A field study of business application systems in financial institutions confirmed the importance of SQA function’s conducting early reviews, especially in the requirement definition stage.