Staffing Software Maintenance Projects with Multiple Service Levels in SLA

Today outsourcing a software system's maintenance is common in software industry. Software maintenance organizations need to estimate the size of software maintenance team, in order to make decisions about acceptance or rejection of a project. In this paper we present a method to estimate the optimal staffing needed for a project that has multiple service levels with different priority and response time. The priority and response time determined with a SLA. We use results of queuing theory to model the maintenance environment with non-preemptive priority M/M/c queue. We also show that response time of an arbitrary request can not be less than a specified time

Keywords:

Outsourcing , Software Maintenance , Non-preemptive Priority M/M/c Queue