Address Defect Levels in Outsourcing Contracts

by Dr. Chris Verhoef

In the world of software, we see unrealistic requirements like bug-free software, 24/7 uptime, and so on. Assessing the feasibility of 99.9999% availability for the delivered system is easy. There are 31,536,000 seconds in one year, and this availability allows for a down time of 31.536 seconds per annum. This is less than one minute. Is that with or without software updates or hardware maintenance? Is it really necessary to have this 24/7 uptime, or is a little less ambitious requirement in order? For example, one company required that the intranet for its expatriates have 24/7 uptime. This requirement was altered to a more realistic one, given the business criticality of the software and the prohibitively high cost of this requirement.

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Address Defect Levels in Outsourcing Contracts 10 December 2003