What is Software Maintenance? [What + Why + How]

As a business owner, if you are facing bugs, security flaws, or lack of performance in your software, you need to opt for software maintenance. Because if your software has any issues or crashes, but you do not update your software, you may lose your potential customers.

That’s where software maintenance helps.

Without regular software maintenance, there are chances of your software failing in the market. To avoid such issues, software maintenance is important as it allows you to resolve security threats, improve user experience, and allows you to stay up with the latest technologies.

As a premier software development company in Toronto, Canada, we know how important it is to maintain a software solution for businesses. This is the reason we have written this blog to help you provide an in-depth understanding of software maintenance. Let’s dive into the blog.

What is Software Maintenance?

Software maintenance is the process to improve, upgrade, and resolve critical issues or bugs in software.

Software maintenance is an integral part of the software development life cycle and considers the customer’s needs. The premise behind maintenance is to enhance the quality of the software and improve the overall performance.

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Let’s understand how much software maintenance can impact the entire software development process cycle.

What are the Benefits of Software Maintenance?

Here are 5 core benefits of software maintenance to know how much positive impact it can bring to your software.

1. Allows you to resolve glitches, improve performance, adapt to changing user requirements, or keep your software up-to-date. This way, you improve the quality of your software.
2. Adding new features, functionality or hardware in a timely manner helps you to avoid paying heavy maintenance costs. This way you reduce the total cost and avoid the chances of your software getting a failure.
3. Continuous upgrades and software changes can improve the overall performance and increase the longevity of the software solution. This can help you to improve user satisfaction.
4. Keeping your software updated with the latest technology and operating systems helps you to provide an extensive user experience.
5. The software development team is aware of the maintenance schedule, which will, in turn, improve overall productivity and efficiency in your company.

These are the benefits of software maintenance. Now, if you are planning to conduct software application maintenance, you should know the different types that you can incorporate.

What are the Different Types of Software Maintenance?

There are 4 types of software maintenance types. Check the following table to understand each type of software maintenance properly and when they are useful.

Let’s take a look at the detailed software maintenance processes that can help you understand how it works.

5 Steps Process of Software Maintenance

Here is a step-by-step look at the software maintenance process. Whether you are performing preventive maintenance or adaptive on a new launch or legacy software, you must follow these steps.

1. Identification and Tracing

   This first step involves determining the part of the software product that needs attention. You can use user-generated or system-generated logs to check the bugs, errors and issues for conducting the maintenance.

2. Detailed Analysis

   The log reports are analyzed to identify the impact on your software program. For example, conducting an analysis of your software performance and security within the log files. Moreover, if any of the functionalities get obsolete, then an upgrade plan is created accordingly.

3. Performance the Maintenance

   In this stage, the software maintenance team starts coding the functions or fixing bugs in your software solution accordingly to the type of software maintenance. This stage includes bug fixing, adding new functions/features, and improving the overall quality of your software solution.

4. Testing of Your Software

   This is the process part where you test the entire system to identify serious issues, effective faults and other software problems. The software product is tested for user acceptance. This test involves identifying if the final product is usable or not after changes.

   In fact, we have written detailed guides about what is software testing, different types of software testing, and a complete software testing life cycle. You might find all these guides useful to get more understanding of the entire software testing process.

5. Deployment of Your Software

   This is the last stage of the software maintenance process. The changes that include modifications are deployed on the servers. If it’s your internal organization software, then it is implemented throughout your entire organization.

So, this is the entire software process cycle for maintenance. Let’s now take a look at the factors that impact software maintenance costs.

How Much Does Software Maintenance Cost?

The software maintenance costs range from 15% to 30% of software development costs. The ultimate cost of maintenance depends on multiple factors. Here are the actual factors that impact the maintenance cost of the software solutions.

• The maintenance plan of the software
• The age of software
• Complexity of software
• The size of software codebase
• The quality of software code
• The level of customization required
• Hourly-rate of software developers
• Location of software developers you hire

If you are interested in more about accurate cost, read this detailed guide on software development costs. By knowing the software development cost, you will be able to find more accurate cost assumptions. However, contact us to get detailed software maintenance costs.

You have learned almost all the essential information about software maintenance. If you still have doubts, let’s get answers to your questions in the following FAQ section.

Maintain Your Software for Long-Term Success

In summary, software maintenance allows you the longevity of the solution and improves the overall quality. When users increase in your software and keep your software in sync, updating your software with the latest trends becomes helpful to become competitive in the market. To perform software maintenance, you should follow the step-by-step process mentioned above.

If you are looking to outsource software maintenance, you can contact an experienced software development company like Space-O. Space-O has experience in developing and maintaining software solutions for multiple industries. We offer all types of maintenance solutions to meet your user requirements. Connect with our software development team to audit your software product and identify the maintenance schedule that best fits your requirements.