Cost of Maintaing Applications

Since applications exist for much longer than the time to develop them, the cost to maintain them can be greater than the cost to develop them. A well built application will have a reduced maintenance cost.

When estimating and building applications, designers and implementors concentrate on "when things go right". The problem is that in a well built application more than 50% of the code deals with "when things go wrong." At Invantix we take this in to consideration up front which not only allows us to complete the application on time, but reduces production downd time and costs. When these issues are not addressed applications will go down more often. On top of this, when they do go down it is harder to diagnose the problem.

Here is an example. A website goes down and the users are seeing Java:NullPointerException. The administrator checks the logs and sees Java:NullPointerException in com.xxx.util.EmployeeFinder 98. The administrator calls the programming team to find out what happens in the code of that class. The whole process takes more that 15 minutes.

On the other hand with good exception handling, logging, and proper checks and flows in the code the system would most likely not go down. In the event it did the message would be more clear: Could not find employee:Exception communicating to database: Database unavailable. Now the administrator knows to talk to the database group rather than the programming group. Also a more friendly usre message would be created for the user.

Our Exception handling, logging, messaging, and other components are designed with these comcepts in mind. Because we can reuse these components on new projects, the time to build the application is not significantly increaced when building for "when things go wrong."