Why is Software Maintenance Essential For Your Business? Posted on 20 December 2022 by Hardik Thakker Software’s life is not just limited to writing code only. Instead, it needs to be available to go through the stages of the ongoing lifecycle that typically stop and start as and when required. Software is constantly changing, and as per its usage, it must be monitored and maintained correctly. This is partly performed to adjust for upcoming organisational changes but is even more critical because technology keeps changing. Software maintenance plays a crucial role in enhancing the growth of your business. So, we’ve come up with an article about software maintenance. But first, let’s start with the basic definition of what is software maintenance and will highlight the importance of using software maintenance in your business. What is Software Maintenance? Software maintenance is the process that allows you to modify or update the software product before it is deployed on the live server. Maintaining the software is as important as developing the software for your business needs. You need to keep detailed information on all the primary aspects of the software solutions that you want to implement for your business. Do you know that the global CMMS software market is estimated to reach $1.26 billion by the end of 2026? Generally, there exist four essential types of software maintenance which are bounded by four key aspects like bug fixes, monitoring, enhancements, and support as shown above. What are the Different Types of Software Maintenance? Let’s highlight four types of software maintenance to make it easy for you to select the best option for your software development lifecycle. Corrective Software Maintenance Corrective software maintenance is the typical and classic form that quickly eliminates and fixes bugs in the existing software. In simple words, this type of software maintenance is solely responsible for identifying errors in the existing solution and correcting them to make it works more accurately. It is primarily done in the form of minor updates frequently. Planning To Develop Robust and Secure Software Solutions? We are experts in designing and building web and mobile app solutions for your business needs using full-stack technologies. Contact Us Let’s go through an example of Facebook. If you’re working on Facebook and suddenly receive an error message highlighting “Unable to login with your Facebook Credentials, ” as shown below. So you need to contact your developer and discover the authentication code that talks to Facebook has a minor defect and needs to be updated to restore login functionality. It’s nothing but the type of software maintenance called corrective maintenance, defined as the reactive modification of a software product performed after delivery to correct discovered problems. In a nutshell, corrective software maintenance occurs when you encounter various errors in business logic, code, and even design perspectives. With the help of this Corrective software maintenance, you can efficiently correct software bugs, errors, and defects that are coming to your software. What are the best examples of corrective software maintenance? If you found that the software needs to be fixed as per your expectations due to some faulty logic flow, wrong implementation, or even invalid or incomplete tests. Once your software is published, your end-users may face some issues. Preventive Software Maintenance Preventive software maintenance plays an essential role in helping you in protecting the system from any upcoming vulnerabilities. This type of software maintenance typically defines software improvements that are specially done to safeguard the software for the future. Moreover, it helps your software from any potential software alteration. Let’s take an example of preventive software maintenance. If you’re making a slight change in your working system, there are high chances that your user base might increase or decrease depending on the software. But your server may not be able to tackle the server’s load. On the other hand, if your server is not working correctly or slowed down, you must be prepared to have multiple angry customers. But, if follow the right procedure to implement the perfect software maintenance process, your user base will improve automatically as depicted in the following figure. To avoid such an upcoming disaster, you must strive to protect yourself from such a disaster by upgrading the hosting server to be more scalable. No wonder you’re having a lot of traffic only on one server; your upgrades will ensure new servers automatically come online to handle the extra traffic. This effort is categorized as preventive maintenance. The excellent part of preventive software maintenance is code scalability or code maintainability. So you can eventually handle your software’s legacy system smoothly. Preventive Software Maintenance defines the adaptions and modifications of the software that mitigate the deterioration risk. Preventive maintenance offers: You can easily create a document updating policy as per the existing state of the system. Efficiently deal with code optimization for better software execution Reconstructing or reducing the code of the software to make it understandable Perfective Software Maintenance With the help of perfective software maintenance, you can easily modify all essential elements, functionalities, and even abilities to efficiently deal with system operations and app performance. This type of software maintenance is solely responsible for dealing with the software’s receptiveness and usability. You can quickly improve, remove, or add additional features to your software by altering current software functionality. I’ll highlight a simple example of preventive software maintenance. Consider the scenario that Facebook has slowed and stopped breaking your site, but you are now bounded with multiple feedback from the user base within some days. You’ll receive a list of feedback from the users that you need to work on. So, rather than sending you back to your profile after logging into your system, it directly redirects you to view the recent activity dashboard. Once you’ve attached a reasonable request to your developer and after a sudden update to the system, your users will be greeted with the latest action. The primary goal of using perfective software maintenance is to deal with functional enhancements to improve the user experience of your software. If you want to update the software system to improve its value per user requirements, you can execute the perfective software maintenance. Perfective software maintenance typically includes Performance enhancement for your better user availability Enhanced user interfaces and software usability Better software functionality and performance Adaptive Software Maintenance Adaptive software maintenance deals explicitly with the compatibility approach per your business needs and technical perspectives. An essential part of this maintenance of software is that it handles the system conversion process, making it easy for you to adapt quickly to significant changes. Once the user enters the system by providing the correct credentials and things are working fine, it’s good. But what happens if the same error comes back to you, and your end-users cannot log in with their credentials? Your development team will have an issue with the API authentication change with the Facebook server. In such a case, you must deal with the support team to develop a new method and identify the best possible solution. While adaptive software maintenance looks an awful lot like corrective software maintenance on the surface, it’s made possible with the help of changing a third-party system that you specifically rely on a different root cause. You must instruct your respective developer to work for additional hours on updating the site to support Facebook’s new authentication method, and everything is back to normal. This maintenance of software primarily focuses on dealing with the software frameworks that make your work easier. Such responsive software is developed to efficiently work with any new operating systems, platforms, and hardware to retain continuity with the software. Adaptive software maintenance is especially used for modifying the software when there are following conditions. The operating system your software executes is evolving Your users generally require the product to work with new hardware as well as software. The expectation of software defects will affect your customers in many ways in the upcoming future. Primary Reasons For Software To Require Maintenance Software’s lifespan depends entirely on the system upgradation to run efficiently on the system. So, to make it easy for you, we highlight some of the best reasons you must follow to maintain the software on a large scale. Michael Bolton, a prominent software testing professional says that Everybody is a tester or can become one to some degree. I mean, we’re born testers. Bug Fixing Process To Minimize Errors In the software maintenance management process, bug fixing is one of the biggest priorities in running the software smoothly. But what’s the bug fixing? It’s just a methodology you need to run to identify the errors or bugs in code and correct them to run your software successfully. Bug fixing typically occurs in hardware, operating systems, or software. Therefore, you can efficiently perform this process without hurting the rest of the functionalities of existing software. Capability Enhancement To Improve Software Performance The next on our list is to improve the software features to build a robust solution capable of dealing with almost all market environments. The primary goal of this procedure is to enhance or improve the performance of software platforms, work patterns, hardware upgrades, compilers, and other aspects that affect system workflow. Boost your business using a technically updated solution by applying software maintenance services regularly. Easily Build Customized Software Solutions With Us We have a team of expert developers who strives to provide the best possible optimum solutions as per your business requirements. Contact Us Removal of Outdated Functionalities For Better Results One of the most challenging factors you must consider in your software maintenance process is removing unwanted functions. If you include such useless kinds of stuff in your software solutions, it’ll make a significant impact on solution efficiency. Your system easily adapts to changing circumstances by replacing maintenance of software parameters like UI and coding elements with new software development. And it is made possible with the help of the latest tools and technologies. Improving the Software Application Performance One of the biggest reasons for using software maintenance is to improve system performance. And that depends on your developers on how they detect issues or bugs, especially by driving through essential testing processes and resolving them smoothly. Data and coding reengineering are the most significant part of the management of software maintenance process. And that’s what is essential in preventing solutions from upcoming vulnerabilities. Moreover, such functionalities help prevent harmful activities like hacking the software application. So, these were the primary reasons crucial to understanding your business’s software maintenance process. So, select the best and most reliable custom software development company to help you choose the best possible solutions for your business needs. Before that, I want to share one thing it’s going to take a long way to make the software robust and free from bugs of any kind. Understanding the Software Maintenance Process The software maintenance planning method is the essential phase of the software development lifecycle. So, it takes place in your system through a standardised management of software maintenance process known as the Software Maintenance Life Cycle (SMLC). You can efficiently implement SMLC in seven different phases, as mentioned below: Identification The first phase of the software maintenance life cycle initiates with the identification. Before you implement any specific change in the software for the requests raised, the modifications are first analyzed and classified according to the attention or maintenance required. You have complete freedom to perform manual or automated software updates, depending on your business needs. Analysis To incorporate any change in the software solutions, you need to efficiently deal with every modification request’s practical and feasible aspects. The analysis phase of the software maintenance process includes validated changes or input where the modification cost is estimated. Design The next phase is the designing phase, where you have to develop a new software framework as per the pre-determined survey. Moreover, it would help if you built testing software and that too for safety and security purposes. Implementation Now, it’s time to design and develop a new software framework by adding the codings to your application. But, again, it depends on your business needs on how you want to add functionality or specification to your system. System Testing The testing phase is the core part of the software maintenance process. You need to mandatorily perform the testing of every code and specification that you implemented on your system. This phase is solely responsible for determining if you require any further changes or additions are needed for the new model of software. Acceptance Testing This stage of software maintenance is solely handled by third-party end-users. What they actually do is simply perform a “dry run test” just to verify whether the specification or functionality is working as per the predefined modification requests or not. Delivery The delivery stage is the final phase of the software maintenance process, where the testing phase is completed successfully by the tester. Then, the developers start to initiate the delivering the software solutions to the end users. Do You Have Any Project Ideas to Discuss? Create seamless one-page web applications with reusable code components with our ReactJS development solutions. Contact Us Strategies That Make Successful Software Maintenance What’s the main planning that you can implement for making the perfect software maintenance? It’s identifying the techniques that drive through the solutions making a significant impact on strategic plans. Let’s go through two essential terminologies that play a vital role in maintaining your software efficiently. Your Software Documentation Must Be Clean – Documentation of your software users must be pure as it involves detailed information related to code operation. Moreover, you’ll also get a clear vision of identifying robust solutions to problems that may occur in the future. As a result, the upgradation is considerably more manageable. Performing the Perfect QA (Quality Analysis) For Your Software – The next important factor you need to consider for the software maintenance process is completing the QA for your application. It would help if you integrated QA either before the launch or during the planning stage itself, and you also need to make sure to deploy software without any errors or bugs. So, these are the major strategies you must implement before building software solutions for your business needs. If you follow these strategies strictly, you’ll gain a secret key to opt for successful software project delivery. Related Post: cost of software development Conclusion Software maintenance is a mandatory process to implement in the software development lifecycle. It’s just like our human body. If we don’t maintain our body, there are many chances of getting severe health problems. Likewise, if you don’t consider software maintenance in your application, there will be a lesser scope for optimum business growth. So, plan accordingly to implement the best strategies and methodologies for making the software maintenance process smooth. Moreover, you can even take the tremendous support of a leading software development company.