Mcbride Financial Case Study

Software Maintenance and Change Control at McBride Financial
When undertaking any software project a critical aspect is to have successful software maintenance and change control plans in place. An optimized and sustainable maintenance plan can help to reduce software project costs as well as provide consistency and repeatability when tackling future similar projects. Furthermore, a plan that controls changes, tests, and implements those changes will make efficient use of the company’s resources. McBride Financial is a “one-stop mortgage provider” (Apollo Group, 2008). Their mission goal is to be the “preeminent provider of low-cost mortgage services using state of the art technology” (Apollo Group, 2008). To make this mission goal a
Four major problems will slow down the organization’s ability to maintain its software efficiently, such as, the unstructured codes, a programmer with insufficient knowledge of the system being implemented, lack of documentation, documentation that is not kept updated and or insufficient documentation. Consequently, the success of maintaining the software life cycle will depend on McBride Financial Services ability and initiate to fix these issues earlier in the cycle of the software before the software reaches the maintenance stage (Stafford,
“Change control aims to ensure that all changes are assessed and approved by management before their implementation. Its goals are minimal disruption to services, reduction in back-out activities and economic utilization of resources involved in implementing change” (Wikipedia, 2008). Change control is the formal process to allow the customer and developer to communicate what is needed to modify or correct problems in an application. This process will convey the specific needs and both the customer and the developers have documentation to show what deliverables will come from the change request. The change process is documenting the request, analyzing technical and business impacts and risks, gaining approval from stakeholders, scheduling and managing the change workflow, and reviewing the change tasks. The change management process in and of itself must also be tuned for operational efficiency assessing the types of changes that are being requested across the organization, the speed with which changes are made, or the number of changes that must be reversed. The software change request require expenditures and may generate revenues over a span of time. A software change can be considered the result of an investment decision in which expenses are dispersed in the belief that greater benefits will be obtained in the future by changing or improving the software. Similarly, the choice