Software Maintenance: What Is It & Why It Must Be Performed?

Getting software developed today is becoming one of the necessities to ease your business process and stay ahead of the competition. But the process doesn’t stop there as it’s equally important that you don’t ignore software maintenance.

In today’s technology-driven world, getting software updates and keeping it updated is something that you should not ignore. And, even software development companies recommend taking it seriously and having a proper software maintenance plan to avoid issues like compatibility or security later on.

But, before figuring out why software maintenance is so essential, what should be your software maintenance plan? First, let’s find out what software maintenance is.

As the name implies, software maintenance means maintaining your software. In other words, software maintenance is a comprehensive management process and a part of SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). Likewise, the main goal of software maintenance within software engineering is to keep software applications updated after deployment, such as to provide updates to improve software performance, fix bugs or updates regarding additional features or another version, and more.

Furthermore, the software maintenance activities are usually carried on once the software is developed and deployed to users. Software maintenance enhances software performance by removing unusable developments and eliminating errors while developing advanced development strategies for better software performance. Likewise, another important reason for software maintenance is to keep the software upgraded with the latest technology to run flawlessly without compatibility issues.

If you go through market segments, you’ll see competitors’ software stays updated with advanced features, making it more important for you to regularly analyze your software and have scheduled software maintenance to keep it updated. Also, different types of software maintenance services are defined depending upon the reasons and purposes.

There are four types of software maintenance services defined according to reasons and purposes. Likewise, a software product may require to go through one or more maintenance types in its entire software maintenance life cycle.

Software maintenance is more about finding and fixing bugs. It becomes essential to keep your business working smoothly. Likewise, here below are the four types of software maintenance:

Corrective Software Maintenance

Corrective software maintenance service is associated with the maintenance of the software. It’s used to identify errors in running software solutions and correct them to make them work accurately according to their defined purpose.

In addition, this software maintenance service helps remove and fix bugs or any other issues within the software. And, it’s usually done in the form of regular minor updates. In other words, corrective software maintenance happens whenever there’s fault and errors in logic, design, or code. Nonetheless, this maintenance step is usually taken from bug reports created by customers or users. But it helps to spot them before any of your regular customers get to know about it.

Adaptive Software Maintenance

Adaptive software maintenance service keeps the software compatible with the advancing business and technical needs. In this software maintenance activity focus is primarily on software frameworks. It’s usually done in response to new operating systems, hardware, and platforms to retain the software’s continuity without any issues.

Furthermore, this adaptive software maintenance is useful when changing the operating system, software dependencies, cloud storage, hardware, or any change within the operating system.

Common examples of these maintenance services are changes in the payment process, modifications of vendors, or updating any service. Some other examples where you can see the need for adaptive software maintenance are like modifying vendors or making any important change regarding the payment process.

Perfective Software Maintenance

As the name implies, this perfective software maintenance service evaluates software requirements and existing features. Once the user interacts with the software or an application, they may come across things that you might not know about or provide suggestions for new features that can be integrated as a part of the software, which helps enhance your software project.

Furthermore, suppose you like to update your software system to improve value according to the user’s requirements. In that case, you can go with this perfective software maintenance service which helps in improving performance, functionality, and user interface.

Preventive Software Maintenance

Preventive software maintenance service prevents your system from becoming victims of any attacks due to vulnerabilities. It’s used to improve security, which helps safeguard your software for the future. In addition, it helps prevent your software product from any potential alteration. Likewise, it also makes it easier to maintain or scale your software code while handling legacy systems.

Lastly, it provides maintenance for code for better execution and even reconstructing or reducing your software code to make it easier to understand.

The life of software depends upon its capability for upgrading to run flawlessly on the installed system. Nonetheless, below are some of the common reasons, due to which Positiwise thinks it’s essential to look out for software maintenance.

Fixing Bugs

In software maintenance, fixing bugs should be on the priority list for running your software without issues. In this, errors are searched from code and corrected. Likewise, bugs can also come from hardware, operating system, or software. Therefore, fixing bugs must be considered that should be performed without hurting any other functionality of existing software.

Removing Unwanted Functionalities

The unwanted features and functionalities are useless. Furthermore, it occupies space within the software solution, which is unsuitable for software efficiency. Therefore, with the help of a software maintenance service, you can remove such functionalities while replacing them with helpful code elements and UI using the latest tools and technologies.

Improving Performance

To improve software performance, developers find issues by testing and resolving the issues. Likewise, coding & data restricting, and reengineering is essential for maintaining software. In addition, it helps prevent software from potential vulnerabilities.

Process of Software Maintenance

Software maintenance planning is the critical phase in SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). Therefore, software maintenance occurs with a well-planned process called SMLC (Software Maintenance Life Cycle) phase, which is made in seven different phases.

Phase – I: Identifying

As the name implies, it’s the first phase of the SMLC where the software modification is identified before addressing any change request. In this phase, requested modifications are analyzed, and then later, it’s classified according to the needed maintenance. Likewise, this phase can be initiated automatically and done manually by the user.

Phase – II: Analyzing

The feasibility for every verified modification request is planned accordingly to incorporate changes within the software. For instance, analyzing details of validated change or input along with the estimation of modification cost.

Phase – III: Designing

Based on the analysis new framework of the software is designed. Likewise, testing software is also developed for security and safety reasons.

Phase – IV: Implementing

Once the design is done, the next implementation takes place. In this phase, a new software framework is implemented. For example, coding, adding a new support system, or new specifications are added.

Phase – V: Testing

Once the new software is implemented according to the requested changes, its codes and specifications are tested. This stage determines whether it requires any further addition or change within the new software model.

Phase – VI: Third-Party Testing

In this phase, third-party users test the dummy software, also called the dry run test. The motto of this phase is to verify whether implemented specifications are working as it needs to, which was defined in the modification request.

Phase – VII: Final Delivery

Once testing is completed and no further changes are required, software developers deliver the final software to the primary software users.

Software Maintenance Cost

Software maintenance is categorized into three components, namely, Software Maintenance, Service Implementation, and Software License. However, software maintenance costs are mainly categorized into two parts: non-technical and technical factors.

Non-Technical Factor

Here in non-technical maintenance cost, often things are considered that aren’t technical like:

• Well-defined system requirements.
• Changing of hardware when software gets outdated.
• Modifying software according to change in an external environment.
• Certain hardware configuration, which is quite rare.

Technical Factor

Similar to non-technical, other technical factors that are included in software maintenance cost are:

• Updating any software block within the system without any negative impact on other software or applications.
• The developer’s coding style determines how easy it’ll be to understand or update software.
• Evaluation of design and testing entire software to find errors within software requirements.
• Clear and concise documentation to get estimated maintenance cost.
• Configuration management to keep track of system documentation.

Wrapping Up

The software maintenance plan isn’t optional, but it’s a must-do activity. Let’s look at it with an analogy of maintaining your car. For instance, if you don’t maintain your car, it may cause problems, and even the cost will be on the higher side instead of the cost of maintaining regularly. Likewise, if you don’t take software maintenance on a serious note, it’ll impact your business growth opportunity negatively.

Nonetheless, if you aren’t sure about it and have questions like what software maintenance activities you should take care of, let us know, at Positiwise, we’ve got an experienced software development team who will give you detailed analysis and provide you guidance on how to carry out the plan.