Adaptive Maintence Management of Software Maintenance Software Maintenace

How to Follow the Best Practices in Maintaining a Blockchain Product?

Yevhen Sakara

By Yevhen Sakara

Oct 06, 2022 / 11 min read

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Today we will talk about the best practices of product development – maintaining software. Software changes and does so constantly, and the best practice is always strict quality management. Its monitoring and maintenance help us do this. It is essential to adapt to organizational change as technology changes regularly.

Maintaining software is essential to business success because it is the central “organ” of your entire business system and helps keep users happy and loyal to your services.

Spoiler: you can turn to our professional dedicated software development teams at OmiSoft, and we will gladly do it for you!

What is software maintenance?

“Maintaining software is the process of modifying a software system or component after delivery to correct faults, improve performance, or adapt to a changed environment” – The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

More simply, software maintenance is the process where software vendors provide updates, modifications, bug fixes, patches, and various additional features to existing software solutions to fix problems and improve performance.

Software maintenance types

Corrective maintenance Eliminate errors and improve system performance. 
Adaptive maintenance Updates and modifications, operation of the product on different equipment. 
Perfective maintenance Support new features and modification of different system functionality under customer requirements. 
Preventive maintenance Modifications and updates to prevent future maintain software problems. 

A bright example is the Y2K bug of 1999. Many companies thought their software would no longer work because the date had shifted, but it was fixed with adaptive support.

Software maintenance cost

A software maintenance fee is a subscription service with an annual cost that you pay for software updates and support. The price is usually a percentage of the product development cost – usually around 16-25%. Best software practices, like choosing to hire dedicated developer, help to reduce this percentage.

A little bit about the reverse engineering of software 

Reverse maintenance in software engineering is restoring the design and specification of a product’s requirements based on an analysis of its code. 

Purpose:

  • Ensuring proper system documentation;
  • Recovering lost information;
  • Assist with maintenance;
  • Ability to reuse software;
  • Detecting unexpected flaws or malfunctions.

Software maintenance process is not just about fixing bugs, as many people think, but mainly about improving the product and making it work perfectly for the user.

Importance of maintaining software product

Developing new software and launching it into the everyday environment is essential for any company. It is worth remembering that software is constantly changing as long as it is in use. And it must be monitored and maintained correctly. On the one hand, this is necessary to adapt to organizational changes, but even more importantly, technology continues to change. So having methods in place to maintain software is a prerequisite.

Why do you need maintenance?

  • Find and correct errors; 
  • Improve the design;
  • Introduce innovations;
  • Easily interact with other systems;
  • Adapt applications to hardware, software, system functions, and telecommunications facilities;
  • Eliminate outdated software;
  • Update third-party SDKs, frameworks, and libraries;
  • Add support for new versions of browsers and operating systems such as Android and iOS.

Monitoring and maintenance are necessary because technology changes regularly, and software application maintenance must keep up with the times.

Best Strategies for Successful Software Maintenance

The software maintenance strategies below will help attract new people to the team or update the product. Moreover, reducing the cost and having management of software maintenance will be easier. 

These items are ready to be used both individually and together to optimize the software maintenance process. Well, let us go!

CHECK DOCUMENTATION 
  • Audit the state of the documentation for developers to eliminate missing parts and highlight elements of the software that are not covered at all.
  • The documentation should be as clear and concise as possible, so ensure there is nothing unnecessary. It needs to provide a detailed and easy-to-use description of how the code should work, with supporting examples. 
  • European tech companies can also implement interactive tutorials for developers to teach junior developers to do the work and learn as comfortably as possible.
DON`T FORGET ABOUT THE CLOUD
  • Analyze what can be easily migrated to the cloud, as this solution will help limit costs and make work a hundred times more convenient. Divide the migration process into stages: The core infrastructure is updated and configured with AWS or Microsoft Azure. It can then be popular with data as we approach the final phase of the migration. 
  • Before migrating to a completely serverless infrastructure, the hybrid approach is a great way to test and optimize a digital product. A simpler serverless infrastructure will also be able to turn on and off those parts of the applications that are not needed regularly.
  • A cloud-based product makes the work of remote teams much more accessible and more superficial. Furthermore, if we need to outsource some of these tasks, we can share any repositories and databases with a third-party team. 
INVEST IN QUALITY ASSURANCE 
  • The most crucial part of the software development process is decent code quality and testing. In the real world, this is not always the case. So what is there to add? Let us break it down:
  • Planning – here, a QA specialist can prepare a complete requirements analysis that will have the final say in completing the next steps of the development process and preventing any risks and errors. 
  • Design – the QA team can collaborate with UI/UX experts to create a plan for testing and analyzing design from the user’s perspective. 
  • Development – of course, based on testing – is one of the most efficient methods, using code with built-in unit tests and constantly refactoring it. 
  • Testing is final but no less important; it can be done when QA specialists check the product for flaws that need to be fixed and optimized. 
AUTOMATING THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
  • Make sure to have a common repository where all the developers on the team put the code they have written. It will be a single source of maintaining software for the project.
  • It is essential to run a standardized process for creating copies of the software.
  • Implement a script to update the latest software version from the repository. Steps will save developers time and resources and avoid having to go through multiple paths to do so. 
  • The test environment should resemble the custom environment as closely as possible to complete the deployment with a single script launch or a button’s click. 
RETHINK PRODUCT INFRASTRUCTURE 
  • Product infrastructure may have evolved organically without a specific roadmap or plan. These problems can be corrected by auditing the current structure and flow.

Key Benefits of hiring a development company for your software maintainance

Product software development is not a suggestion but a necessity for every business. If software maintenance plan is not seriously considered in the business, there will be fewer opportunities for optimal business growth. Then numerous failures will begin to occur, which will be very difficult and sometimes impossible to deal with without professional hands. Why is it worth to hire a dedicated developer or team to maintain the product? This service will save time, the product will be constantly updated, and users will always be happy.

Our OmiSoft team has been working on this issue for a long time. Did you face systemic problems that slowed down your business? Have problems supporting your product? Don’t worry! Our dedicated IT team can take control of it and solve the problem of support and further development of your product on a turnkey basis. Learn how hundreds of our customers have already been satisfied with professional software maintenance.  

We will be glad to help you, write to us and get a free consultation!

Contact Us!

Yevhen Sakara

By Yevhen Sakara

CBDO & Co-founder

Oct 06, 2022

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