A Study of Software Maintenance Costs of Air Force Large Scale Computer System

Software maintenance is a growing concern throughout the software community. Due to the rising cost of computer software and the even greater increase in the software maintenance share of the budget, maintenance is becoming the major cost in a data processing organization. This thesis examines the maintenance costs of Air Force organic software for the last thirty years. Generally, the cost per line of code and the total costs are rising for the large scale automatic data processing computer systems. Contractor developed software is also examined and its influence on Air Force software costs.