Software maintenance

 

Software maintenance

While you have come to this page it is important that at the end of this information you get to learn what software maintenance entail.

And the objectives of this post is that readers are taken through on;

·         Meaning of software maintenance;

·         History of software maintenance;

·         Importance of software maintenance;

·         Software maintenance planning;

·         Process with software maintenance;

·         Types is /categories of software maintenance;

·         Why software maintenance needed?

 

Meaning of software maintenance;

In software engineering, when modification (as changes are made) on software product to enhance its performance and also to put right some faults or other attribute or features may be added. It may also involve upgrade and updates made on software after being created or developed.  When at times it may be seen as a common way that maintenance is that merely involve fixing defects. This could arise by its user submitting problems reports to enhance functionality to the system in reality cases. Such as bug-fixing at more recent studies have it to be closer to 21%.

History of software maintenance;

The first maintenance system for software and evolution was first addressed by Meir M. Lehman in the year 1969. The research of Lehman led to the formulation of Lehman’s Laws (Lehman 1997). He then from his research came up that maintenance is evolutionary development, while maintenance decision will be aided by definite understanding of what has resulted from the system/software over time. Also, more studies, indicate that contribution/submission of reports of end users is another reason during the new requirement data collection and analyzing them. Software maintenance is crucial because it requires a larger portion of the entire lifecycle costs and also the tendency not to change software quickly and letting us that business opportunities are lost.

Importance of software maintenance;

Software maintenance is a wide scope of activity that involves error correction, enhancement of features and capabilities, deletion or removal of outdated capabilities and optimization. This is because, changes or modulations is inevitable such mechanism and technicalities have to be developed for evaluation, making changes/modification and controlling. So, any work being done to correct or change or even add to the software is considered as maintenance working process. The reason is to preserve or maintain the value of software overtime. Moreover, the value can be widened, enhanced by increasing the customer base, additional requirements being met, making it easier to use, more efficient and using newer and updated technology. And lastly here, software maintenance issues are 2, the managerial and technical. Management issues are those of staffing, customer priorities, and which organization does the maintenance. While the technical issues are impact analysis, testing, limited understanding, maintainability measurement.

Software maintenance planning;

This has to do with the maintenance plan to be developed/constructed for or during the software development. It should indicate and clearly show and give specifications of how users will request modifications or report problems. The scales to budget which should include resource and cost estimates. The software maintenance projected already to last 5 years plus or decades after its development process do call for a solid and effective planning which discusses and meet the scope of software maintenance, the crafted post-delivery and/or deployment working process, the organization of who will do the maintenance and approximate figuring of life-cycle costs.

Process with software maintenance;

Briefly, here is the enumerated description with software maintenance process;

1.       The implementation process – it includes software preparation, and conception of maintenance plan. The follow up on product configuration management and seeing into problems identified while in development.

2.       The problem and modification analysis process – this become executable immediately the application has become the maintenance crew responsibility. In the course the maintenance programmer analyse request, confirming it, checking validity, investigate and solution proposal.

3.       The process of implementation of the modification – it is the implementation process of modification itself.

4.       The process of acceptance of the modification – this is to ensure that the modification provide a solution with individual who submitted the request.

5.       The migration process – if the software is being ported to another platform with no change in functionality the process will be used which the project team is likely to take up the task.

6.       The maintenance process – it is an event that may not occur daily.

 

Types/categories of software maintenance;

1.       Corrective maintenance – modification or changes of a software product done at post delivery of software product to correct problems detected. Such maintenance can be auto with automatic bug fixing.

2.       Adaptive maintenance – mod. of a software done at the post delivery to keep a software product being usable in a modifiable environment

3.       Perfective maintenance –  mod. of a software product at the post delivery to enhance or improve performance or how maintainable it is. and;

4.       Preventive maintenance – mod. of a software at post-delivery to find out and make correction to latent faults in the software products prior to becoming effective faults.

Why software maintenance needed?

Software requires the ability to be upgraded or updated so to ensure the longer lifespan. The reason for maintenance of software. Bug fixing in maintenance management become priority to run a software seamlessly. This ensure the process of coming up to search for errors in code and submitting them to correction, and this should be done without affecting the rest of functionalities of current software developed.

Capability enhancement is the improvement in features and how the functions of a software are solved with ranging market environment.

Other reasons for maintenance are – Performance improvement, removal of outdated functions.