Benefit: Less Maintenance and Support

The amount of time and resources expended on the administration, maintenance, modification and extension of an application are often an underestimated cost factor which rises with the increasing complexity of the application. Pressure of costs is most often felt in this area because according to studies these costs have a 50-90% share in the overall costs and thus by far exceed the actual development costs. Why actually?

Cost Factor

High costs have several reasons:

• Often the initial project developers are no longer available, which makes the task of training new employees very time-consuming. And even if the initial developers are still around, they need to brush up their knowledge of the application before they can get to work on it.
• After the development, the documentation of the application is an important aid, yet often it does not reflect the most recent development stage.
• Normally, the slightest modifications of existing applications have substantial side-effects, because the program logic of many applications is not clearly separated into different concerns. Assessing the possible consequences if often a matter of luck.

Solution

The zen Platform minimizes this cost factor by promoting an intuitive understanding of the application, dividing tasks into separate well-structured concerns and reducing downtime, thus making the costs predictable. Using the zen Platform and zen Developer, the unpredictable costs resulting from the actual application development are therefore no longer relevant, and projects can be planned on a long-term basis.

» more