Cost comparison for the development and maintenance of application systems in 3rd and 4th generation languages

Application systems represent considerable assets in many companies today. What they do is essential to the company’s activities. This leads to an increasing lifetime of application systems. It may be presupposed that the costs for application systems may be more strongly influenced by management than by any other factor. Using data on costs for applications development and maintenance, this paper compares life cycle curves on the basis of empirical data. The basis for cost comparison is a longitudinal field study of the life cycles of application systems developed in third and fourth generation programming languages. This field study is complemented by a summary of the results of other studies.