Software Maintenance Life Cycle: A Detailed Guide for 2023-24

Irrespective of how efficiently software is built, there’ll always be a space for enhancement. As time passes by, your business scales, and so do its necessities. That’s why you need to maintain your software to keep it aligned with the current business environment.

However, it’s crucial there’s no end to the software maintenance, and this is because there’s no software out there with perfection. You have to constantly upgrade and update your software to keep it in alignment to ensure it meets your constantly growing requirements.

Since maintaining software is a never-ending process, it may be way more complex for you. Hence, you better have a strategic plan to execute the software maintenance process. Let’s learn how to manage this ever-evolving procedure with ease and convenience!

Let’s dig deeper!

What Is Software Maintenance?

Software maintenance is one of the significant processes, or you can say a crucial element of the software development life cycle. It gets started after the development is completed and the software is deployed. The preliminary intent of maintaining software is to make sure it performs well and remains aligned with the constantly increasing or changing requirements of the marketplace. For this you need to know best practices for legacy software modernization so that you maintain your system effectively.

In short, software maintenance is the practice that consists of continuously upgrading a software product intending to fix bugs and add necessary elements and features to improve its performance and bring it in alignment with the current business requirements. Maintaining software not only makes the software perform flawlessly but also enhances the user’s experience, improving better opportunities for growth.

What’s the Importance of Software Maintenance?

There are plenty of reasons why software requires maintenance. There are many like feature enhancement, cloud migration, and many others that can be the reason for maintaining software. Regardless of the reason, if your software requires maintenance, you mustn’t take it lightly— as it may bring you at the risk of losing efficiency or, in the worst-case scenario, your customers, too.

You may choose software maintenance as per your industry requirements. For example, the manufacturing sector mostly opts for these five maintenance types. According to Statista, “Preventive maintenance program is the most commonly deployed maintenance strategy” within the manufacturing sector. In 2021, 88% of businesses dealing in manufacturing used preventive maintenance strategies.

Drawbacks If Software Maintenance Ignored

Have a look at the examples of how obsolete software can let your business down!

Benefits of Software Maintenance

When you perform software maintenance on time, you circumvent the possibility of encountering such scenarios and run your business efficiently. Let’s explore in detail why you should keep your software maintained!

Excellent Performance and Efficiency

Software having obsolete functionalities accumulates tech debt and causes a mitigated system’s efficiency. Furthermore, it makes the software rigid and tough to be updated. When you follow the software maintenance process, you replace those obsolete features and coding elements with new and trending functionalities so that the software can conveniently adapt to the current industry trends and remain no longer affected by tech debt.

Accelerated Project Continuity

Your IT infrastructure and other systems must be functioning optimally for your project’s continuity. Any disruption in this may cause the processes and productivity of your organization to suffer. With maintenance, you can make sure the software, as well as the operations, won’t be affected by unexpected circumstances.

No matter whether it’s your server going down or a sudden hike in user requests when you perform software maintenance, you equip your system to deal with any issues like this and keep the project going with no interruption.

Robust Data Security

Robust security is another reason why you need software maintenance. It makes bug fixing, reengineering data, and encoding constraints way easier while keeping the system from being vulnerable to security concerns.

Furthermore, maintaining your software is crucial to deal with hacking attacks. Hackers, in general, find it handy to hack an older application; hence, maintaining your system with the latest features and functionalities enhances its robustness against these vulnerabilities, making your data more secure.

Software maintenance is an integral part of software development life cycle (SDLC). Like SDLC, it’s a constant process that occurs after building software that involves bug fixes, optimization, and deletion of discarded features and optimizing the existing ones. Here are the phases of this lifecycle that you should have a look at!

Problem Identification

This is the preliminary phase of the software maintenance process that involves the identification of the problems in the software. In this phase, the team of dexterous engineers analyzes the modification request to ascertain the certain areas that require modification and assign modification numbers to each.

After that, developers examine the modification request so that they can determine the type of software maintenance. The type of maintenance can be of any type, including corrective, adaptive, preventive, or perfective. Then, the developers prioritize each modification request to ensure creating an order following which it will proceed.

Problem Assessment

Problem assessment is the second phase of the software maintenance life cycle. This phase determines the possibility and scope of each validated modification request. In the problem assessment phase, the developers plan every possible change to be made in the software. They do it based on the validated modification requests, the initial resources, project documentation, and repository information.

Designing

The next phase we have is called the design phase. In the design phase, developers create a module that consists of the things in need of replacement and modification. Furthermore, they create test cases that address the safety and security aspects to validate and verify the system.

The design phase includes multiple activities, including modification of the software modules, documentation, revising the modification list, creating test cases for new designs, creating regression tests, and so on.

Execution Phase

The implementation, or execution phase, is where the developers make modifications to the code, add specifications, integrate new features, and modify the whole software from the get-go. Here, the input attribute comprises the design phase output, source code, modified system, and project documentation.

Testing

Now, we have the testing phase in which the development or testing team conducts integration testing of the system and new modules. The preliminary intention for conducting this testing is to make sure no new bug is introduced in the software once it gets modified during the software maintenance process.

Eventually, developers test the whole system inside out by performing regressive testing. The developers, once done, can create test reports and reviews and the updated software documentation.

Acceptance Test

After testing, the acceptance test comes into play wherein the internal users, along with third parties, specify and test the integrated system. The key purpose of this testing is to verify and ensure the new integrated features and functionalities work in the way expected or mentioned in the modification requests.

Product Delivery

Once the acceptance testing gets done successfully, the product delivery takes place. In the product delivery phase, the team of developers working on the project delivers updated software to the client. Besides, they provide extensive documentation containing manuals and files that describe the software operation manual and hardware specifications.

Best Practices for Effective Software Maintenance

The plan for software maintenance should be created based on a business’s specific needs. Below mentioned are some tips you should know to get help when creating a software maintenance plan that brings optimized success.

Conclusion

That’s all there’s to it! While software development is something that brings your ideas to life, maintenance is what keeps it alive in the marketplace. As time passes by, your business scale and the requirements change. This includes not only your business requirements but also your customer’s requirements.

Therefore, software maintenance becomes unavoidable to maintain so that you can bridge the gap. It keeps your software bug free and updated and enhances data security, resilience, and the overall performance of your existing system. Moreover, it helps you keep tech debt at bay.

In this article, we discussed software maintenance, its importance, the types of software maintenance, along with the software maintenance life cycle. If you’re in need of software maintenance, we’re a custom software development company providing core software maintenance services to businesses across the globe to get their requirements extinguished. Connect with us to leverage the benefits.