Development of a framework to estimate the software obsolescence resolution cost of custom build real-time software.

Software plays an important role in the defence sector. Almost every project in defence has got software with various degrees of complexity and dependencies. Software obsolescence is one of the key cost drivers which has historically been assessed as part of the maintenance cost due to the lack of data/information and due to the fact that there are no tools, techniques, or framework to help with the software obsolescence management. Therefor it is key for the industry and Defence sector to address software obsolescence and to find an approachable way to counter the effect of software obsolescence. The aim of this research is to develop a software obsolescence cost analysis framework to predict the software obsolescence resolution cost of custom build real time software at early stages of the product life cycle. For the accomplishment of the aim, an extensive literature review on software obsolescence and its related themes was undertaken, a systematic case study with online survey corroborated the findings and revealed the current practices in the UK Defence sector. Further collaboration with 35 experts from industries led to undertaking a cognitive case study to enable the iterative development of Software Obsolescence Cost Analysis Framework. This was demonstrated by applying the framework to five case studies as part of expert validation. The novelty of this research is that it tries to solve an issue with significant real- world impact for which very little work exists with lots of real-world inputs from SME and real case studies. Cognitive case study with software experts is unique and has never attempted before to solve this issue. The research comes up with a novel way to quantify the costs for the very first time with strong input from primary data sources. The key limitation of the research is in the unavailability of any historic technical data.