App Dev managers are under high pressure to create new, highly complex applications while maintaining legacy applications. Failure to properly estimate maintenance costs leads to a loss of integrity with the business and poor quality development. A balanced parametric or expert approach alleviates the many pain points brought about by relying on a single estimation method and allows the development team to combine both a bottom-up and top-down approach framework in order to apply the best-fit technique. The cost of change is low, as it allows stakeholders to continue employing their current estimation technique or adopt one on demand.
Take a systematic approach to implement cost estimation practices in your organization:
- Determine organizational maintenance needs based on skill, practice, tracking, and governing.
- Optimize your current maintenance estimation process by injecting expert and parametric costing models into flow. Simulate optimized flow on a historic two-year portfolio.
- Conduct an impact analysis. Update any changes in your SOP. Track one-time and ongoing costs. Compare against estimates.
- Communicate regularly with stakeholders.
Realize that maintenance estimation techniques must be applied on an ongoing basis. Find out what processes and approaches work through a gradual rollout with appropriate metrics and measurements.