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The world as we know it today has evolved into a highly competitive place that does not accommodate slow-paced businesses. Establishing your presence has become more challenging than ever. Businesses are now expected to deliver top-notch services without sacrificing customer satisfaction. Thankfully, you can get customized software to suit your specific business needs and provide the best services in your niche.
Custom software provides the right functionality and evolves with the changing requirements of growing businesses. However, this is not achievable without proper custom software maintenance. Not only is maintenance an important part of the software development lifecycle, but it is also a continuous process that keeps your solution in its best shape.
This blog dives deep into the process, the importance, and the benefits of custom software maintenance, as well as the right strategies to adopt.
Why is Custom Software Maintenance Important?
Functionality
Businesses opt for custom software applications to get the right functionality and to be able to offer the best services in their respective niche. While upholding unique business values, these applications provide organizations with the most convenient ways to go about day-to-day operations.
With that being said, custom software are just like off-the-shelf software when it comes to bugs, defects, and run-time errors. In certain cases, these issues may even multiply over time. And that is when the importance of software maintenance shines through.
Security
Software maintenance covers all the measures taken to counter unexpected issues such as crashes and security concerns. By doing it right, developers can maintain the stability and usability of the application, ensuring that the business using it doesn’t have to face any downtime.
Efficiency
If you dig deeper, custom software maintenance is the necessary fine-tuning you need to extract maximum performance from your solution. The process optimizes the code, enhances database queries, and fills in memory leaks. As a result, users get a highly responsive and seamless experience that provides businesses with the engagement they are looking for.
Types of Software Maintenance
Corrective Maintenance
Bugs and errors are a part of every software’s lifecycle. Corrective maintenance is the type of maintenance that addresses the issues that can affect the design, code, and logic of your application. When the software is in use, bug reports are automatically generated to allow quality assurance engineers to spot these problems.
The goal of corrective maintenance is to identify and resolve these issues before users notice them. Understandably, this is important to avoid staining brand reputation by ensuring stability, security, and performance.
As the name suggests, corrective maintenance is about making the necessary changes within a given time frame. It comes under the category of urgent maintenance tasks and is mainly focused on low-priority issues in custom software development.
Adaptive Maintenance
Software applications are designed to be used on a wide range of platforms, but that is only made possible by performing adaptive maintenance. With customized software, you always need to be sure that your application will be able to adapt to changes in platforms and the introduction of new technologies. Thankfully, adaptive maintenance addresses this by modifying the software to fit in with new operating systems, third-party integrations, and even hardware.
Adaptive maintenance is typically carried out in tandem with corrective maintenance, allowing developers to update the system for new platforms while addressing bugs. Some bugs, such as speed issues and lags can be automatically fixed when the software is updated for a more advanced operating system.
One of the advantages of adaptive maintenance is that it allows you to pinpoint software issues before they become critical and also helps reduce the number of code changes required. Rather than fixing bugs after they are discovered, you can use this approach to update the code beforehand.
Perfective Maintenance
When developing customized software, users are normally concerned about the quality as compared to legacy software from trusted brands. With perfective maintenance, you can guarantee that the software will perform its intended functions without running into problems. The process covers the addition of new features, code optimizations, and UI and UX improvements.
When it comes to enhancing the performance of your application, it's important to not only fix the bug but ensure that it does not generate again. Quality assurance teams need to be consistent in their practice to look for bugs as perfective maintenance requires attention to detail.
Perfective maintenance also includes the improvement, evolution, and introduction of features into your software application. Upon using the software, users often find something missing and also make suggestions for improvements. Here, perfective maintenance helps improve functionality and enhance user experience.
Preventive Maintenance
With new technological developments coming every year, any software built today will go out of date in some time. To keep up with the times, software development teams need to perform preventive maintenance. This kind of maintenance covers all aspects related to the deterioration of a software solution as ages. Preventive software maintenance includes code optimization and thorough documentation to ensure long-term stability.
By making your software more understandable and maintainable, you have better chances of improving engagement for businesses. For this reason, preventive maintenance is a must. You need to go beyond just fixing bugs and render your software future-proof. Considering the fast pace of technological evolution, the preventive maintenance process should ideally allow your software to work well in changing environments without deteriorating. Then there are the changing requirements of businesses and individual users. Preventive maintenance ensures that the software performs as intended and continues to be a secure and convenient solution in the years to come.
Benefits of Regular Software Maintenance
There is a reason so many businesses are investing in custom software. However, the real purpose cannot be fulfilled without the guarantee of ongoing software maintenance. The benefits of custom software maintenance extend beyond resolving testing issues; they involve making meaningful changes that have a real impact. Here are some of the major benefits of regular software maintenance.
Improved System Stability and Performance
With operating systems, hardware, and applications becoming more and more advanced, you need to be sure that your software is ready to change as required. Custom software maintenance allows you to keep your software updated and compatible as new operating environments are introduced to the world.
If you perform regular maintenance, your software will be able to connect with a wider range of devices, versions of third-party applications, and other integrations. The benefits don’t stop there either, as users get to experience seamless transitions between pages and have no issues in terms of compatibility with upgrades and new releases.
Enhanced Security and Vulnerability Management
Apart from performing the intended functions, the software is also expected to be secure against cyber threats. No business would want to lose their data to malicious attackers and that is why software maintenance regularly includes security patches.
As part of your maintenance practices, you are able to identify loopholes and vulnerabilities within your code. Following that, developers are able to make the necessary updates to the code and libraries to strengthen the software against threats. In case you miss out on security patches, your clients are always going to be at risk of serious data breaches.
Cost Savings Compared to Reactive Fixes
When a user encounters a bug in your software, it means it's already too late to perform maintenance tasks and you have to resort to reactive fixes. Not only do reactive fixes cost more, but they are unplanned and mess up the entire schedule of development teams. Instead, the best practice is to implement plans for software maintenance beforehand.
Performing software maintenance and identifying issues proactively allows you to bypass critical problems that can be very costly. If you keep an eye out for potential areas of improvement and optimize your software for performance and security, you are able to save valuable resources.
Best Practices for Effective Custom Software Maintenance
Software maintenance is clearly an ongoing and never-ending process. As long as your software is being used, it is always going to need improvements and fixes here and there. Here’s what you need to know about effective custom software maintenance.
Regular Monitoring and Evaluation
Once your software is up and running, you need to constantly monitor and evaluate its performance. Checking whether the software works according to the client’s requirements allows you to pinpoint potential problems and fix them. Some of the important metrics to be monitored are system uptime, user feedback, and resource utilization. Apart from getting the maintenance process right, evaluating these aspects also helps you keep you make better decisions about new releases and improvements to your software.
Timely Updates and Patches
Coming back to the security aspect of the software, it's essential to keep sending out timely updates and patches to ensure that your application runs smoothly. Just like receiving updates on your smartphones, these maintenance tasks include bug fixes, performance improvements, and in some cases the addition of new features. But most importantly, they provide the security necessary to keep your application safe from cyber attacks.
Proactive Issue Identification
Just like in any other IT-related system, software requires proactive issue identification to reveal some of the hidden errors. This is especially important because the identification of an issue is where you either get on the right track to improve the software or lose it all by misunderstanding what’s really happening. Your software maintenance plans must include regular testing and identification of even the smallest of errors so that the users do not face any downtime.
Documentation and Knowledge Management
Whether you consider software maintenance in specific, or software development as a whole, documentation is of utmost importance. Without documentation, you cannot keep track of anything and you never know what you’re working on. The best practice in this regard is to document every single change in code, architecture, and design so that it can be maintained and managed easily.
Implementing the Right Software Maintenance Strategy
Challenges in Custom Software Maintenance
Dealing with legacy systems
One of the main challenges in custom software maintenance is getting around legacy code. These programs are outdated and often come in the way of newly updated code. The real issue arises due to the lack of proper documentation and testing of legacy systems, which puts developers in a tough spot with unpredictable compatibility issues.
Balancing maintenance with new feature development
Adding a new feature to your software is always a bit of a challenge as every new change connects with a lot of existing aspects. Developers often struggle to streamline the development of new features alongside maintenance tasks, as they need to think about the compatibility and integrations of the new feature but also consider the implications on the existing system.
Managing evolving user requirements
Another challenge that comes in the way of software maintenance is the changes in user expectations over time. This is because you can never measure or anticipate what the user may expect now and how their expectations will change in the future. It often happens that a user wants you to build the software to behave a certain way, but is not able to communicate what they expect. To ensure that user expectations are met, and you need to establish strong communication channels with them.
Future-Proofing Your Custom Software
Anticipating Future Technological Changes
When you’ve been in the field of software development for a considerable amount of time, you can somewhat guess what is to come. This is exactly what is required to develop a future-proof solution. Keeping in mind what the world is currently running on, and anticipating what it will need in the future, allows you to plan your software maintenance effectively. The end goal here is to keep the doors open for innovation and improvements.
Designing software with scalability in mind
If you are incorporating all the right practices into your software development process, chances are high that it will be used for bigger purposes in the future. It is one thing to create a solution that gets the job done. But it's another thing to create a scalable solution. Once your customer bank grows and bigger businesses start searching for your software, it must be ready to take up the challenge.
Key Takeaways
Custom software maintenance is now becoming more important than ever, as user expectations are increasing and the competition between digital solutions catches on. The goal behind developing customized software is to achieve maximum performance and ROI. None of that can be achieved unless you keep your applications and web platforms up to date and maintain them well. So your best bet is to invest your time and resources in effective software maintenance processes.
