Program Maintenance and Change Control Plan

Software maintenance and change control plans are critical to the overall success of a software project. A properly executed plan will not only provide more reliable coding changes, and change implementations; it will also have beneficial financial impacts on the company. Large portions of software expenditures are related to program maintenance. Poorly tested or documented changes and coding changes implemented on an emergency basis as twice as costly as those that are well planned and tested. A plan that controls changes, tests, and implements the changes in a thorough manner will make more efficient use of all the companies' resources. To be effective a plan must be in place through the entire life cycle of a software application. This paper will document the requirements and benefits of software maintenance and change control plan as well as a providing a proposed plan.

The maintenance of existing software can account for over 60 percent of all development effort. Change is inevitable; mechanisms must be developed for evaluating, controlling and making modifications. Software maintenance is a set of software engineering activities that occur after software has been delivered to the customer and put into operation. Seventy per cent of the cost of software is devoted to maintenance.

Maintenance activities can be divided into two types: modification and debugging. More than two-fifths of maintenance activities are extensions and modifications requested by the users. Emergency bug fixes cost more than routine, scheduled corrections. They are performed under pressure, disrupt the orderly process of delivering new releases and tend to introduce new errors.

Software configuration management activities are developed to identify change, control change, assure that change is being properly implemented, and report change to others who may have an interest. Software configuration management is a set of tracking and control activities that begin when a...