Maintenance Outsourcing
The outsourcing of selected applications to be maintained by a third-party vendor requires a much different set of measures from those used in the project or application outsourcing arrangement. The key elements involved when one is considering the measurement of a maintenance outsourcing arrangement include the following:
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Monitoring customer expectations
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Maintaining an acceptable response time
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Limiting bad fixes
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Limiting the volume of fixes
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Monitoring the decrease or increase in application functionality
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Establishing effective hand-offs
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Ensuring application expertise
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Monitoring smooth customer interfacing
All of these factors are measurable, although not all of them require the use of function points. Let's examine several situations and see how function points play a role.
Monitoring customer expectations is an opportunity to use function points as a means to monitor the growth of the entire application portfolio, as well as to maintain an overall view of the costs associated with each application. Monitoring the increase or decrease of functionality in any given application allows the development organization to monitor the cost of functionality supported.