Source: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/software-engineering-software-maintenance/

This article is titled “Software Maintenance – Software Engineering.” Software maintenance “refers to the process of modifying and updating a software system after it has been delivered to the customer.” There are many different aspects involved in this including: fixing bugs, adding new features, and keeping up with new hardware and software requirements. Maintenance is very important for ensuring that software is able to last long. This process can be expensive and complex, so these factors must be taken into account during the planning of a software development project. The important tasks in regard to software maintenance are: bug fixing, enhancements, performance optimization, porting and migration, re-engineering, and documentation. Summarizing these tasks, it is important to find and fix errors quickly, add new features/improve existing ones, improve the performance of the software, adapt the software to run on different hardware, improve the design, and maintain accurate documentation of all of these processes. There are quite a few different types of software maintenance, but they can be categorized into proactive and reactive types. “Proactive maintenance involves taking preventive measures to avoid problems from occurring, while reactive maintenance involves addressing problems that have already occurred.” Maintenance can be done by stakeholders, the development team, a third-party, and they can be both planned or unplanned. Planned maintenance can be described as regular maintenance (bug fixes) while unplanned maintenance can be described as reactive maintenance that occurs when something unexpected happens. Maintenance can fall into these different categories: corrective maintenance, adaptive maintenance,  perfective maintenance, and preventive maintenance. Corrective refers to fixing bugs and enhancing performance of the system. Adaptive refers to modifications being made when a customer needs the software to run on a different system. Perfective refers to the adaption of the software when a customer has a demand. Lastly, preventive maintenance refers to modifications that focus on the prevention of future issues with the software. Software maintenance is important but there are some things to consider: the cost, complexity, possibility of new bugs, users not updating the software, compatibility, technical debt, and end-of-life (where maintenance isn’t possible anymore or cost-effective).

I chose this article because I found it in the syllabus and thought the topic to be interesting. We are always learning about the development of software, but the idea of maintaining it over the long term isn’t as heavily considered. A large part of the work of a software development team is to obviously develop software but it is also important to learn about how it can maintain a sense of longevity free from error and customer complaints. I will keep the information I learned from this article in mind in future projects and when I’m working with a team to ensure that I’m developing software all the while keeping maintenance in mind. If it is considered during the development process, the maintenance process will be much easier.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Shawn In Tech by Shawn Budzinski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.