In software development, the key stages of planning are usually design, coding, testing, and deployment. However, the software development cycle doesn’t end after the deployment phase. Much of the work begins at the launch, but there’s an important phase after deployment—the software maintenance stage, also known as the operational stage in DevOps.
Once you deploy your software, you must regularly refresh it to ensure it runs smoothly and the systems are reliable.
The software maintenance process is an essential part of the software development life cycle (SDLC) that seeks to enhance user experience, reduce downtime, and modify the system for future changes.
It’s a process that’s even more important for organizations in terms of software engineering, as technology keeps changing, and it’s easy to lag behind the innovation train.
This article discusses Software Maintenance in detail, providing reasons why it is vital for your business’s success.
What is Software Maintenance?
Software maintenance is the process of modifying and updating software to correct bugs, improve performance, adapt to new environments, and keep up with the user’s needs. It happens once the software is released to correct bugs and boost performance.
However, software maintenance can be very costly. In fact, estimates from studies place the maintenance phase of SDLC at roughly 90% of its entire cost. Continuous maintenance is key for both performance enhancements and efficient cost management.
Which Software Maintenance approach is better?
When it comes to software maintenance, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, every software product undergoes many types of maintenance, each serving a specific purpose to address different needs throughout the software’s lifecycle.
1. Corrective Software Maintenance
As the name “corrective” suggests, this type of maintenance seeks to identify, analyze, and rectify issues that could’ve surfaced during the software’s use.
For example, users might report a bug or an error in a piece of software, or when something significant goes wrong. Some of the reported issues could majorly impact the software functionality and must be addressed as quickly as possible.
The best part of the corrective software maintenance process is that you don’t need to wait until users report an issue with the software product. You can always schedule corrective maintenance shifts to spot and address any faults before users discover error messages.
2. Preventive Software Maintenance
Preventive software maintenance involves addressing any small issues with the software that could blow up into something big. The process aims to reduce the risk associated with operating software by making it stable, understandable, and maintainable.
It’s the role of your software development team to carry out a maintenance process that addresses the faults within software applications before they impact various parts of the software architecture, such as the logic and code.
Make necessary upgrades or adaptations so that the software can continue to work as desired for a long time. For example, you may review the software and decide to optimize the code or update documentation, which, in turn, may prevent software deterioration throughout its adaptation and change.
3. Perfective Software Maintenance
Perfective software maintenance comes into play once the software is released and open for public use. It’s a maintenance approach often considered when new issues and ideas that could potentially make the software the best tool available arise.
This type of maintenance aims to modify software, including user suggestions or any feature that could be useful in the long run. It could also involve removing features that are not effective in the software. The process enhances user experience and keeps software up to date with the changing market and user dynamics.
4. Adaptive Software Maintenance
Adaptive software maintenance is a maintenance protocol that ensures the software is up-to-date and compatible with new technologies, security threats, operational processes, and many more. It’s a necessary process, especially when the software environment changes.
For example, if you’re running an e-commerce business and want to update payments on the site, then you’ll need to conduct an adaptive maintenance exercise to change the payment processors.
You can also carry out the exercise to ensure that a product interfaces with new software dependencies, hardware, or operating systems.
5. NoOps: AI-driven Maintenance
AI-driven systems automatically detect anomalies and solve issues without human intervention to minimize downtime. It can be done both proactively and correctively.
Dynatrace (Pro-Active and Corrective Maintenance)
It uses Davis AI for anomaly detection in real-time, root cause analysis, and automatic performance optimization. It works great for distributed, complex environments.
Datadog (Pro-Active Maintenance)
It offers monitoring resources with machine learning functions for anomaly detection, metrics, and logs. It can also predict performance metrics and resource usage.
Ansible Automation Platform (Corrective Maintenance)
Ansible can be used for self-healing. It integrates alerts and insights from AI tools (such as Dynatrace or Python scripts) so that Ansible automatically runs playbooks to resolve issues (restarting a service, scaling a pod, or applying a patch).
6. Security Maintenance
Security maintenance is the ongoing process of keeping software and applications safe. This maintenance approach isn’t an afterthought; instead, it’s built in parallel with development and deployment processes.
Key aspects of software security maintenance include:
- Vulnerability Monitoring and Management: Continuously monitoring for new vulnerabilities, assessing their potential impact, and prioritizing them for mitigation.
- Security Training: Constantly training the company’s employees on cybersecurity best practices. According to Verizon, 60% of security breaches involve the human element. This might extend to the SDLC if the company is not careful.
- Patch Management: Regularly applying security updates (patches) released by software vendors to address known vulnerabilities.
- Secure Configuration: Ensuring software is configured securely, disabling unnecessary features, and using secure protocols for data transmission.
- Regular Security Audits and Assessments: Performing periodic security assessments, such as penetration testing, to identify potential weaknesses.
- Incident Response: Having a plan in place to respond to security incidents and breaches.
- Zero Trust: A security model that operates on the principle of “never trust, always verify”. It requires continuous verification and authorization of all access attempts, from login to downloads.
- Staying Updated: Keeping up with the latest security best practices and threats.
7. Cloud and Container Maintenance
Even if your application, server, or database is on the cloud or in a Docker container, it requires maintenance. Cloud and container maintenance involves managing and updating the infrastructure and applications within a cloud environment, specifically focusing on containerized workloads.
This approach ensures the security, performance, and availability of both the cloud platform and the containers running on it. Common tasks for cloud and container maintenance include patching, monitoring, scaling, and orchestrating container deployments.
Keep in mind that cloud infrastructure maintenance includes maintaining the underlying cloud resources like virtual machines, networks, and storage. It involves tasks like applying security patches, managing access controls, and optimizing resource utilization (for cost optimization).
For containers, the focus is on the lifecycle of containers, including deployment, scaling, and updates. Container orchestration tools like Kubernetes, Docker, or Jenkins play a crucial role in automating these processes.
8 Best Strategies for Effective Software Maintenance
To ensure effective software maintenance for all your projects and software development process, start by implementing regular software monitoring to guarantee it is up to date and fully functional.
You should follow up with regular upgrades to ensure that the systems have the latest patches and features for a more secure and stable software.
Here is a more detailed look at the best strategies for effective software maintenance:
1. Conduct Regular Updates
The reason your software is prone to errors and systemic failures is that to the overlooked vulnerabilities that make it outdated. Software that’s not regularly maintained and updated has weaknesses that could lead to data breaches and slowed systems.
If you want to keep your software in its optimal state, consider updating it regularly to stay current with software versions. Updates provide improved functionality and the latest patches that address existing vulnerabilities, like bugs and crashes.
2. Invest in Quality Assurance
As a standard protocol, your software must pass through various testing phases before going live. This is a necessary quality assurance procedure to troubleshoot and find short-term or temporary solutions to any problems. Always invest in proper end-to-end and UI testing for effective software maintenance to ensure usability and integration. Follow up with a concurrent Quality Assurance exercise from planning to the testing phases to further reduce the need for post-production software maintenance.
3. Ensure Proper Documentation
Detailed documentation plays a significant role in software maintenance by providing a roadmap for all maintenance activities. It works for complex software environments involving distributed teams working on one project.
Developers working on the software maintenance project can greatly enhance the quality and usefulness of the software products by following the best practices documented. This makes it easier for future developers to maintain code and learn from the past developers’ mistakes.
This documentation advice also applies to version control systems (Git) to manage source code and track changes. When your devs commit to a change, make sure they write a message about it in their “git commits”. This way, your team can easily track back and revert to previous versions if needed and maintain a consistent development environment.
4. Testing Procedures
Testing procedures are vital to ensure their continued relevance and effectiveness in any software maintenance exercise. It involves regularly reviewing new software updates and changes to ascertain whether they introduce any issues. Effective software maintenance requires you to establish rigorous testing procedures that can help maintain the integrity and functionality of your software. Set up testing procedures, such as unit or integration tests, that reveal whether your software performs as expected.
5. Consider Performance Optimization
Performance optimization in software maintenance refers to the process of refining the software to keep it as effective and efficient as possible. Optimizations are crucial preventative measures that help you resolve and address issues before they become critical.
Performance optimization practices in software maintenance ensure your software performs at its best over its minimum lifetime. This can take any form or measure, such as optimizing code or reworking the software architectural design to align with evolving technologies.
6. Implement Robust Monitoring Systems
Use tools like Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to detect anomalies, performance bottlenecks, security threats, and operational inefficiencies in real-time. Set up alerts for critical thresholds and analyze logs and metrics for patterns.
Your team can also utilize bug-tracking systems (e.g., Jira, Bugzilla) to prioritize and resolve issues quickly. Categorize bugs by severity and priority, and ensure clear communication between teams about them. Instead of waiting for a glitch to be reported by the end user, it’s vital to keep a log tracking of all potential issues.
7. Prioritize Technical Debt Reduction
Address technical debt (shortcuts or quick fixes) by writing clean, efficient code and adhering to coding standards. Regular code reviews and refactoring are key.
This is particularly necessary when your company uses LLMs in the development stage as well. You never know if the AI is stockpiling its technical debt in your application until it’s too late.
8. Receive User Feedback
Actively encourage users to report bugs, suggest improvements, and share their experiences. User insights are invaluable for identifying issues and making informed decisions about updates and enhancements.
Make sure your team is well-informed about how the user experiences their software.
Conclusion
Software maintenance plays a crucial role in optimizing software systems and keeping them efficient throughout the SDLC. Maintenance processes, such as preventive, perfective, adaptive, and corrective, are key practices for ongoing software improvement.
These maintenance practices are vital in software engineering as they improve software systems to make them more efficient. They also ensure increased productivity and could help you cut on revenue loss occasioned by costly workflow interruptions due to inefficient systems.
Given the significance of implementing all forms of software maintenance for your development projects, you cannot handle it unless you have a team of developers ready to do the work.
