Types of Software Maintenance and Why They Are Crucial for Your App

Exponential technological progress has given birth to a rat race where businesses go to any lengths to fly past their competitors. Every company wants to provide the best possible service to its customer base. If you want to see your organization become a top service provider of your time, proper application maintenance and support is one effective strategy that can take you a long way.

There are many types of software support and maintenance services. The type of service you need can depend on the nature of your app.

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Once we go over the types of maintenance and support, we will also go over the various reasons why you might want to consider investing in these services and how they could substantially benefit your business and brand.

Types of Application Maintenance and Support Services

There are two quite broad categories into which support and maintenance services can be divided.

The first type is corrective maintenance. As its name suggests, this type of service involves the resolution of a problem that has already occurred. This service type is further divided into two more categories: deferred maintenance, and emergency maintenance and/or support.

If the issue that has arisen does not need to be addressed urgently, then the fix can be delayed or ‘deferred’. This means the app does not have to undergo any unnecessary downtime. An example of this type of service can be seen where the development team may notice a minor error in the code or logic which has not had any major impact yet but must be solved in the near future before it does some real damage. The repairs can be done as soon as the best opportunity presents itself.

On the other hand, if for example, the app suddenly crashes or the users report some other major issue that needs to be fixed right away, then you may have to employ emergency application support services. You might even have to take the app offline immediately in order to resolve such an error.

The second type of maintenance is preventative in nature. This applies in situations where the app has not yet run into any problems and you want it to stay that way! There are five sub-types of preventative maintenance:

1. Failure-finding maintenance
2. Condition-based maintenance
3. Risk-based or predictive maintenance
4. Time-based or scheduled maintenance
5. Perfective maintenance

The first two types of preventative maintenance usually only apply to hardware or physical assets. We will be talking about types 3, 4, and 5 below.

Perhaps a type of software maintenance that can be the equivalent of risk-based hardware maintenance is predictive maintenance. The common goal of both these activities is to identify any parts of the system that may cause trouble in the future and find ways to address these troubles in the best way possible in order to most efficiently mitigate the impacts. For example, if there is a critical third-party plugin used about which there are rumours of discontinuation or obsolescence within three months, then continuing to use the plugin might cause the app to crash after the designated time has passed. Therefore, you will have to carry out the necessary application maintenance and support to update or substitute that particular plugin in order to ensure stable app functionality.

Time-based maintenance refers to the maintenance activities that are scheduled beforehand and are considered necessary in order to ensure that the software application continues to run smoothly. These activities are often scheduled to be carried out periodically, say, every two months, every year, or as often as the product manager and owner deem it necessary. Under time-based maintenance, the team might go over the entire code base and user-facing interface to make sure that everything is working as it is intended to.

Perfective maintenance aims to work on all possible areas of improvement in the current system. As its name suggests, it aims to make the software app perfect. The developers study the software and try to pinpoint any improvements that can be made to make the system the best that it can be. For example, if there is a certain code block that can be optimised by replacing it with a new and updated library or framework, this will fall under perfective application maintenance services. Another similar type of service is known as adaptive maintenance, under which you have two goals. The first one is to strive to maintain the app such that you stay abreast of the latest technological advancements. Certain significant upgrades might have to be made to your app in this phase. The second aim of this kind of maintenance is to make sure that your app is well-adapted to the changes in consumer behaviour.

Why Your App Needs Support and Maintenance

There are several reasons why it is absolutely necessary to invest in quality application maintenance and support services. Below are the two most critical benefits.

One of the most significant benefits of reliable support and maintenance is that your business will be able to maintain excellent customer relationships. Without proper support, you will end up providing broken apps to your clients, which can make them quickly switch to your competitors’ offerings. If you want customers to stay loyal to your brand, you need to keep your head in the game and serve flawless software to them. With regular application maintenance services, you can not only ensure that your app works perfectly but also make improvements in the software as demanded by your customers.

Another important aspect of app maintenance is the constant security concerns that need to be kept track of and dealt with before they even become a serious concern for you or your customers. These days, the threat of cybercrime is rapidly on the rise. Often, cybercriminals are actively on the lookout for software products that have the potential of being easily breached. Therefore, you need to keep your code base regularly updated and test for vulnerabilities so that they can be addressed before anyone gets a chance to hack their way into your software. Without proper security updates, your customers’ private and sensitive data as well as your private business intellectual property may be at risk.

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