Integrating Outsourcing in the Maintenance Process

Outsourcing of software life cycle activities is a growing business area in many sectors influenced by Information Technologies. This fact, coupled with the usual lack of planning and high costs of software maintenance, may invite many organizations to outsource this important process of the software life cycle. Such outsourcing should be relied to a “technological associate” who can carry out this process using an adequate methodological foundation. In this paper we present the outsourcing strategy that we have integrated in MANTEMA, a methodology for software maintenance developed by our university and Atos ODS, a multinational organization which provides software maintenance services to third-party organizations.