Managed Services
What is Managed Services
Managing systems after development to ensure products run correctly and get updated on a regular basis. Software maintenance is done after the product has launched for several reasons including improving the software overall, correcting issues or bugs, boosting performance, and more.
Why is software maintenance important?
Creating a new piece of software and launching it into the world is an exciting step for any company. A lot goes into creating your software and its launch including the actual building and coding, licensing models, marketing, and more. However, any great piece of software must be able to adapt to the times.
This means monitoring and maintaining properly. As technology is changing at the speed of light, software must keep up with the market changes and demands.
What are the 4 types of software maintenance?
The four different types of software maintenance are each performed for different reasons and purposes. A given piece of software may have to undergo one, two, or all types of maintenance throughout its lifespan.
The four types are:
- Corrective Software Maintenance
- Preventative Software Maintenance
- Perfective Software Maintenance
- Adaptive Software Maintenance
Corrective Software Maintenance
Corrective software maintenance is the typical, classic form of maintenance (for software and anything else for that matter). Corrective software maintenance is necessary when something goes wrong in a piece of software including faults and errors. These can have a widespread impact on the functionality of the software in general and therefore must be addressed as quickly as possible.
Many times, software vendors can address issues that require corrective maintenance due to bug reports that users send in. If a company can recognize and take care of faults before users discover them, this is an added advantage that will make your company seem more reputable and reliable (no one likes an error message after all).
Preventative Software Maintenance
Preventative software maintenance is looking into the future so that your software can keep working as desired for as long as possible.
This includes making necessary changes, upgrades, adaptations and more. Preventative software maintenance may address small issues which at the given time may lack significance but may turn into larger problems in the future. These are called latent faults which need to be detected and corrected to make sure that they won’t turn into effective faults.
Perfective Software Maintenance
As with any product on the market, once the software is released to the public, new issues and ideas come to the surface. Users may see the need for new features or requirements that they would like to see in the software to make it the best tool available for their needs. This is when perfective software maintenance comes into play.
Perfective software maintenance aims to adjust software by adding new features as necessary and removing features that are irrelevant or not effective in the given software. This process keeps software relevant as the market, and user needs, change.
Adaptive Software Maintenance
Adaptive software maintenance has to do with changing technologies as well as policies and rules regarding your software. These include operating system changes, cloud storage, hardware, etc. When these changes are performed, your software must adapt in order to properly meet new requirements and continue to run well.