Maintenance issues in outsourced software components

Software outsourcing is becoming a popular alternative in the software industry, and the evidence for the importance of assuring the quality of subcontractors' contributions is found in ISO 9000-3 Std and ISO/IEC 2001. There are risks and benefits of introducing subcontractors in the framework of the project. One of the major risks is the future maintenance difficulty. Reliable maintenance is only possible if adequate measures are taken in advance during the project's development and maintenance planning phase, and documented in the maintenance contract. In this paper, we present and make a justification for a set of recommendations to make such maintenance reliable and cost-effective. We analyze the associated risks and develop a model to estimate the overall product quality metrics during the maintenance phase.