ABSE Reduces Maintenance Costs

Software maintenance is the modification of your software product after it has been delivered to its customer(s), to correct faults, improve performance or other features, or to adapt the product to a new or changing scenario.

Maintenance plays an important role in the life cycle of a software product. It is estimated that there are more than 100 billion lines of code in production in the world. Unstructured, patched and not well documented code account for as much as 80% of this. As a result, maintenance costs were observed in various studies to consume from 50% to 80% of total life cycle costs, and typically consumed 65% to 75% of total life cycle costs.

With ABSE you'll have less code to maintain. That's because you only have to maintain one instance of your code (the Atom Template). All other instances of that code (through Atom Instances) are automatically updated. And as your product grows and your model matures, it's likely that the percentage of code needing maintenance will decrease.

Custom code is natively supported by ABSE, so there's no need to waste time maintaining protected regions, code guards and other trickery, just to keep the integrity between manual and generated code: You can add and modify your custom code directly on the model.

A maintenance task is comparable to a development task - except for the additional task of "understanding the existing product". This "understanding" task is the dominant maintenance activity, consuming roughly 30 percent of maintenance time. So, we can claim that maintenance is more difficult than development.

ABSE allows for a better understanding of your product. Working at a higher abstraction level can give you an overview of the whole project, making it easy to understand algorithms, features and architectures.