What is Software Maintenance? [What + Why + How]

Frustrated with your existing software’s performance? Is it costing you time and customers? These are clear signs that it needs software maintenance services.

It’s important to understand that even expert-built software systems degrade over time, leading to more bugs, critical security vulnerabilities, outdated tech stacks, and declining performance. Without proper maintenance, these software issues can open the door to security breaches and crashes, ultimately harming the end user experience. 

Regular software maintenance tailored to your business needs is crucial to avoid such problems and keep your software running smoothly over the long term. It helps address security threats, improve user experience, and ensure your legacy systems stay up-to-date with modern technologies.

As a leading software development company in Canada, we understand how vital maintenance operations are to ensure your software’s security, performance, and continued relevance. That’s why we created this blog: to provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of software maintenance, its importance, benefits, and types.

So, let’s proceed by getting a quick overview of software maintenance.

What is Software Maintenance?

Software maintenance is the process to improve, upgrade, and resolve critical issues or bugs in software.

The software maintenance phase is an integral part of the software development life cycle and considers the customer’s needs. The premise behind maintenance tasks is to enhance the quality of the software and improve the overall performance.

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let’s take a quick look at its importance to understand how software maintenance can impact the entire software life cycle.

Why is Software Maintenance Required?

Software maintenance is essential for every system to ensure it operates without disruptions and continues to deliver business value and a satisfactory user experience. Here are some key reasons that signify the importance of software maintenance: 

1. Ensure operational efficiency: Regular maintenance ensures that the software runs without disruptions. Code auditing and refactoring help eliminate inefficiencies, optimize the codebase, remove performance bottlenecks, and improve resource utilization for faster performance.  
2. Ensure security: With evolving cybersecurity threats, consistently monitoring the system for vulnerabilities is crucial. Regular maintenance, which includes timely security patch updates and adherence to regulatory compliance, ensures that your software safeguards user data and is resistant to security breaches.
3. Enhance user experience: Timely software maintenance ensures your software remains free of security loopholes and delivers frictionless performance by responding to user requests promptly. This enhances user experience, boosts user engagement time and, in turn, revenue for your business. 
4. Increase system sustainability: Software maintenance involves deploying system compatibility updates, upgrading deprecated packages, and adding features that align with the modern user demands. These practices ensure that your system stays relevant, up-to-date, and future-proof for long-term success. 

These are some of the most important reasons why software maintenance matters. Building on these points, let’s now discuss the key benefits of maintaining your software regularly.

What are the Benefits of Software Maintenance?

Here are 5 core benefits of software maintenance to know how much positive impact it can bring to your software.

1. Allows you to resolve glitches, improve performance, adapt to changing user requirements, and keep your software system up-to-date. This way, it helps enhance the quality of your software.
2. Adding new features, functionality or hardware in a timely manner helps you to avoid paying heavy maintenance costs. This way you reduce the total cost and avoid the chances of your software getting a failure.
3. Continuous upgrades and software changes can improve the overall performance and increase the longevity of the software solution. This can help you to improve user satisfaction.
4. Keeping your software updated with the latest technology and operating systems helps you to provide an extensive user experience.
5. The software development team is aware of the maintenance schedule, which will, in turn, improve overall productivity and efficiency in your company.

These are the benefits of software maintenance. Now, if you are planning to conduct software application maintenance, you should know the different types that you can incorporate.

What are the Different Types of Software Maintenance?

There are 4 types of software maintenance. Check the following table to understand each type of software maintenance and its use cases properly.

Let’s take a look at the detailed software maintenance processes that can help you understand how it works.

5-Step Process of Software Maintenance

Here is a step-by-step look at the software maintenance process. Whether you are performing preventive maintenance or adaptive on a new launch or legacy software, you must follow these steps.

1. Identification and Tracing

   This first step involves determining the part of the software product that needs attention. You can use user-generated or system-generated logs to check the bugs, errors and issues for conducting the maintenance.

2. Detailed Analysis

   The log reports are analyzed to identify the impact on your software program. For example, conducting an analysis of your software performance and security within the log files. Moreover, if any of the functionalities get obsolete, then an upgrade plan is created accordingly.

3. Performance the Maintenance

   In this stage, the software maintenance and support team starts coding the functions, fixing bugs, implementing performance enhancements, or adding new features to your software solution according to the selected software maintenance type. This stage focuses on improving the overall quality of your software solution.

4. Testing of Your Software

   This is the process part where you test the entire system to identify serious issues, effective faults and other software problems. The software product is tested for user acceptance. This test involves identifying if the final product is usable or not after changes.

   In fact, we have written detailed guides about what is software testing, different types of software testing, and a complete software testing life cycle. You might find all these guides useful to get more understanding of the entire software testing process.

5. Deployment of Your Software

   This is the last stage of the software maintenance process. The changes that include modifications are deployed on the servers. If it’s your internal organization software, then it is implemented throughout your entire organization.

This concludes the software maintenance lifecycle from a software engineering perspective. Now, let’s take a look at the factors that impact the overall cost of software maintenance.

How Much Does Software Maintenance Cost?

The cost of maintaining software typically ranges from 15% to 30% of total software development costs. However, the actual cost of maintenance depends on several factors. Below are some key aspects that impact the software maintenance expenses.

• The software maintenance plan
• The age of software
• Complexity of software
• The size of software codebase
• The quality of software code
• The level of customization required
• Hourly-rate of software developers
• Location of software developers you hire

If you are interested in more about accurate cost, read this detailed guide on software development costs. By knowing the software development cost, you will be able to find more accurate cost assumptions. However, contact us to get detailed software maintenance costs.

You have learned almost all the essential information about software maintenance activities. If you still have doubts, let’s get answers to your questions in the following FAQ section.

Maintain Your Software for Long-Term Success

In summary, software maintenance allows you the longevity of the solution and improves the overall quality. When users increase in your software and keep your software in sync, updating your software with the latest trends becomes helpful to become competitive in the market. To perform software maintenance, you should follow the step-by-step process mentioned above.

If you’re looking to outsource software maintenance, consider partnering with an experienced software development company like Space-O. Our team of expert maintenance engineers has a proven track record of developing and maintaining software solutions across multiple industries. We offer all types of maintenance solutions to meet your user requirements. Connect with our software development team to audit your software product and identify the maintenance schedule that best fits your requirements.