"The difference between a fully equipped group of maintenance specialists and normal, casual

maintenance can be up to several hundred percent in productivity and 50 percent in quality."

Capers Jones,  Estimating Software Costs, 2008

 IT organizations with legacy applications to maintain must deal with:

• The high cost of maintenance programming for legacy software
• The challenge of staffing for legacy systems
  
• The lack of expertise to implement a best practices maintenance operation
• The challenges programmers face with system comprehension, including:
• Understanding the system
• Locating code to be changed
• Analyzing the impact of changes
  

Software maintenance accounts for 80-90 percent of the lifetime cost of software applications, yet new software development receives the bulk of attention for process and productivity improvements.

vLegaci was formed to address these problems and make software maintenance more cost effective and productive through the following products and services:

Software Maintenance Training helps IT staff improve the skills associated with maintaining legacy software.  This unique training program helps programmers improve their program comprehension, impact analysis, testing, refactoring, estimating and other skills that are specific to software maintenance tasks.  It lays the foundation for management to implement a measurement system leading to a process improvement program of software maintenance.

Maintenance Outsourcing enables organizations that are supporting legacy systems to achieve goals such as reducing maintenance costs, refocusing on other priorities, moving to a more variable cost structure and so on.  Outsourcing arrangements can be structured in a variety of ways that suit the organization's objectives and circumstances.

Maintenance Tools: Codelyzer is a Program Comprehension tool designed to assist RPG maintainers in the task of analyzing code.  Studies have shown that software maintainers spend 40-60 percent of their time just trying to understand the programs they work with.  Codelyzer is designed to significantly reduce this overhead as well as make unfamiliar programs approachable.  Read more about Codelyzer and participate in the beta program here .

Check the Knowledge page for quick background information on the science of maintaining legacy systems.  Also check Steve Kilner's blog for more information about the field of software maintenance.