Software maintenance work typically is much more expensive than what it should be and takes more time than required. In software organizations, maintenance work is mostly carried out using ad hoc techniques. The primary reason being that software maintenance is one of the most neglected areas of software engineering. Even though software maintenance is fast becoming an important area of work for many companies as the software products of yester years age, still software maintenance is mostly being carried out as fire-fighting operations, rather than through systematic and planned activities.
Software maintenance has a very poor image in industry. Therefore, an organization often cannot employ bright engineers to carry out maintenance work.
Even though maintenance suffers from a poor image, the work involved is often more challenging than development work. During maintenance it is necessary to thoroughly understand someone else’s work and then carry out the required modifications and extensions. Another problem associated with maintenance work is that the majority of software products needing maintenance are legacy products