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that even expert-built software systems degrade over time, leading to more bugs, critical security vulnerabilities, outdated tech stacks, and declining performance.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.
Table of Contents
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.
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:
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.
Here are 5 core benefits of software maintenance to know how much positive impact it can bring to your software.
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.
There are 4 types of software maintenance. Check the following table to understand each type of software maintenance and its use cases properly.
Software Maintenance Type | Definition | When to Use |
---|---|---|
Adaptive Maintenance | Adaptive software maintenance means upgrading the software as per the requirements. This type of software maintenance involves upgrading the latest operating system, plugin versions and libraries so that the software product doesn’t go outdated. | You want to upgrade your software to the latest operating system, third-party plugins, hardware requirements, or upgrade the entire software system to a new version. |
Corrective Maintenance | Corrective software maintenance is done to conduct thorough system testing after the product is released to correct faults. It is more of an error correction method that involves fixing bugs and improving the overall quality. | You want to fix the bugs, improve performance, enhance security, and address customer feedback on your software solution. |
Preventive Maintenance | Preventive software maintenance, backed by impact analysis, is used to identify future problems and avoid more maintenance. This maintenance includes removing features, identifying latent faults, and even checking on the software design and source code. | You want to release major system updates and make significant changes in your software product. |
Perfective Maintenance | Perfective software maintenance is used to identify new modules the software needs. It is also used to perfect the software product by adding new functionality and features relevant to user needs. | You want to meet the changing requirement of the market, improve performance and usability, and make changes as per direct response to customer feedback in your software. |
Let’s take a look at the detailed software maintenance processes that can help you understand how it works.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Want to Get an Estimation of Software Maintenance Costs?
Talk to us. Brief us about your software maintenance requirements. Our experienced software consultants will provide you with a personalized quote.
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.
Check out all the ways in which you can improve the software maintenance:
The main activities that a software maintenance team conducts include- optimization of the software product, error finding, discarding or deleting the features that aren’t worthy and important modifications.
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.
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