12
May

Types of Software Maintenance and How they help

Software maintenance is one of the most important phases of a Software Development Lifecycle. For instance, Smartym Pro always offers a wide range of maintenance services to its clients in addition to traditional full-cycle app development. Software maintenance includes all the post-release activities, including modifications and server management works. Software Maintenance is needed for any type of applications for many reasons, some of them are:

  • Market changes constantly, new rules, and conditions appear that need to be complied with. You can’t use the same software in the changing environment;
  • New requirements from clients can appear out of the blue, in this case having a maintenance team by your side to implement new functionality will be very convenient;
  • Software updates. Technologies don’t stand in one place for too long, they constantly evolve and upgrade. If you don’t adjust your software according to the freshly released versions of the technologies used, your project will become legacy sooner or later, which can further negatively impact the business in general.

It may come as a surprise to you, but there are various types of software maintenance. Some companies – maintenance services providers offer these types of maintenance separately, others – like Smartym Pro – provide all types of software maintenance at once. Let’s get a brief look first, what are the 4 main types of maintenance.

Corrective maintenance

When we talk about fixing bugs, software defects, and other weaknesses – we talk about corrective maintenance. Bugs can appear unexpectedly any time after the release into production, this is why it is so essential to have a maintenance team that will resolve any kind of problem before it becomes a disaster for the business. 

Corrective maintenance is aimed at making the user experience smoother, to avoid making them worried about bugs and glitches in the system. The most complex about it is that the maintenance team needs to act as fast as possible because the more time is spent on fixing an issue, the more becomes the risk of losing even the most loyal users.

Adaptive maintenance

When the market, law, business, or IT industry presents any type of changes – new restrictions, updates, amendments to the law, data protection policies, etc., this is where adaptive maintenance services come to help. Adaptive maintenance helps prepare the software for the new settings.

As has been mentioned earlier also adaptive maintenance is aimed at preventing the software from becoming outdated. New operations systems versions appear frequently, some programming languages or frameworks can become no longer supported by its creators. In this case, it is extremely important to act fast in order to make the application relevant and up-to-date.

 

Perfective Maintenance

Perfective Maintenance is aimed at keeping the application fresh, good-looking, and attractive for new users in terms of new functionality. In order to let the application stay on track for a long period of time, you need to implement new features every once in a while, otherwise, users will get bored and choose a more competitive application.

Moreover, the more users there are, the more loaded become the servers, which can affect the overall performance. Perfective Maintenance activities can help make the software scalable, fast and smooth no matter how many users are going to use it at the same time. 

 

Preventive Maintenance

The main goal of preventive maintenance is to prevent the software from becoming unbearable to work with. The main procedure made within the preventive maintenance approach is code refactoring. Code refactoring is an indispensable activity when it comes to creating high-quality stable software. Sometimes preventive maintenance also includes documentation maintenance, to make sure that all the newcomers to the project won’t be confused and be ready to start working on the spot without spending too much time figuring out which of the 50 versions of SRS is the right one. 

According to one survey, businesses can save up to 18% of their assets if they invest in preventive maintenance since corrective maintenance is a much more costly type of service.

If you got lost in all those names of types of software maintenance, don’t be shy – contact us and we will tell you more about the benefits of each of them. Smartym Pro has been providing software maintenance services from 2012 in numerous business domains, our team is able to find a suitable approach for mobile and web applications and ensure effective services as well as a very nice price-quality ratio.