The Korea Software Industry Association (KOSA) has begun working on a guideline that clarifies responsibilities of defect maintenance. The guideline is expected to be applied to the Ministry of Economy and Finance’s standard operating procedure on contracts by the end of the first half this year at the earliest and prevent unfairly expanded boundary of free defect maintenance and damage caused by the unfairness on the software (SW) industry.
The KOSA signed a service contract last month to prepare the guideline and has begun working on necessary studies.
The Ministry of Economy and Finance (MOEF) accommodated a request from the SW industry through a task force that was ran last year to improve the contract system and decided to push forward a project that clarifies responsibilities on defect maintenance regarding SW businesses.
According to the MOEF, suppliers (developers) are responsible to provide free maintenance for a year once they are complete with their work.
Any additional work that is not included in the contract must be paid by customers as soon as work from developers is completed. Any defect maintenance that occurs after one year from completion of work also needs to be paid by customers.
However, there are not many public institutions that sign maintenance costs that are not free of charge right after any work is completed. In other words, they take advantage of the free one-year defect maintenance period and change their requirements or request developers to perform system upgrade that must be paid by them in normal circumstances. Most of developers reluctantly accommodate requests from public institutions.
The KOSA received many cases similar to the situation when it conducted a survey on “excessive requests for SW defect maintenance”.

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There were cases when public institutions requested developers to perform maintenance for free even when changes were made due to changes in systematic structure or working process. There were even cases when institutions asked for free maintenance for work caused by institutions’ negligence.
“There were also cases when government officials who replace government officials in charge of maintenance during a one-year period ask for requests that were not in the contracts.” said a representative from a SW company. “While it is normal for SW companies to accommodate parts of such requests, such requests happen to small and medium-sized companies most of the time.”
Most people from the industry believe that such requests are made due to lack of clarification. There is no clear boundary for defect maintenance according to the MOEF’s standard operating procedure. Although the Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning separated maintenance and repair to maintenance and defect maintenance while it was revising the “standards on software’s technicality” in 2017, it did not set a clear boundary.
It is expected that there will be less of the practice of requesting paid maintenance services during the one-year defect maintenance period once the guideline is prepared. There will also be less cases of public institutions signing contracts while including excessive requests on defect maintenance to their requests for proposal (RFP).
The KOSA plans to complete the guideline by the end of May. The MOEF’s standard operating procedure is expected to apply the guideline correspondingly.
“Although it is important to clarify the boundary on defect maintenance, the fact that public institutions do not set their budgets for maintenance that will be used for a year after the work is completed is the issue.” said one official from a mid-sized IT service company. “Because requests besides defect maintenance are considered as paid services, they need to set aside their budgets that will be used for a year.”
Staff Reporter An, Hocheon | hcan@etnews.com