Process of software maintenance

Every phase has to be completed be. Nifty 18, Adani Power Market Watch. Budget ET NOW. Suggest a new Definition Proposed definitions will be considered for inclusion in the Economictimes. Software Engineering. Spiral Model The spiral model is similar to the incremental development for a system, with more emphasis placed on risk analysis. Description: Software maintenance is a vast activity which includes optimization, error correction, deletion of discarded features and enhancement of existing features.

Since these changes are necessary, a mechanism must be created for estimation, controlling and making modifications. The essential part of software maintenance requires preparation of an accurate plan during the development cycle. Easy Normal Medium Hard Expert. Writing code in comment? Please use ide. Load Comments. What's New. Most popular in Software Engineering. More related articles in Software Engineering.

Hence, maintenance is crucial for proper functioning. This is a guide to Software Maintenance. Here we also discuss the introduction and need for software maintenance along with advantages and disadvantages. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more —. Submit Next Question.

By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Forgot Password? This website or its third-party tools use cookies, which are necessary to its functioning and required to achieve the purposes illustrated in the cookie policy. Also, understanding the factors that influence the maintainability of software can help to contain costs. Some environmental factors and their relationship to software maintenance costs include the following:.

Software maintenance in terms of evolution was first addressed in the late s. Some state that maintenance is continued development, except that there is an extra input or constraint —in other words, existing large software is never complete and continues to evolve; as it evolves, it grows more complex unless some action is taken to reduce this complexity. IEEE includes a fourth category—preventative. IEEE classifies adaptive and perfective maintenance as maintenance enhancements.

It also groups together the corrective and preventive maintenance categories into a correction category, as shown in Table 5. A number of key issues must be dealt with to ensure the effective maintenance of software. Software maintenance provides unique technical and management challenges for software engineers—for example, trying to find a fault in software containing a large number of lines of code that another software engineer developed.

Similarly, competing with software developers for resources is a constant battle. Planning for a future release, which often includes coding the next release while sending out emergency patches for the current release, also creates a challenge. The following section presents some of the technical and management issues related to software maintenance. They have been grouped under the following topic headings:. Limited understanding refers to how quickly a software engineer can understand where to make a change or correction in software that he or she did not develop.

Research indicates that about half of the total maintenance effort is devoted to understanding the software to be modified. Thus, the topic of software comprehension is of great interest to software engineers. Thus, software engineers may initially have a limited understanding of the software; much has to be done to remedy this. The cost of repeating full testing on a major piece of software is significant in terms of time and money. In order to ensure that the requested problem reports are valid, the maintainer should replicate or verify problems by running the appropriate tests.

Regression testing the selective retesting of software or a component to verify that the modifications have not caused unintended effects is an important testing concept in maintenance. Additionally, finding time to test is often difficult. Coordinating tests when different members of the maintenance team are working on different problems at the same time remains a challenge.

When software performs critical functions, it may be difficult to bring it offline to test. Tests cannot be executed in the most meaningful place—the production system. The Software Testing KA provides additional information and references on this matter in its subtopic on regression testing. Impact analysis describes how to conduct, costeffectively, a complete analysis of the impact of a change in existing software. They use that knowledge to perform impact analysis, which identifies all systems and software products affected by a software change request and develops an estimate of the resources needed to accomplish the change.

Additionally, the risk of making the change is determined. The change request, sometimes called a modification request MR and often called a problem report PR , must first be analyzed and translated into software terms. Impact analysis is performed after a change request enters the software configuration management process. IEEE states the impact analysis tasks:.

The severity of a problem is often used to decide how and when it will be fixed. The software engineer then identifies the affected components.

Several potential solutions are provided, followed by a recommendation as to the best course of action. Software designed with maintainability in mind greatly facilitates impact analysis. Modifications may include corrections, improvements, or adaptation of the software to changes in environment as well as changes in requirements and functional specifications.

As a primary software quality characteristic, maintainability should be specified, reviewed, and controlled during software development activities in order to reduce maintenance costs. Maintainability is often difficult to achieve because the subcharacteristics are often not an important focus during the process of software development. This in turn can, and often does, result in a lack of software documentation and test environments, which is a leading cause of difficulties in program comprehension and subsequent impact analysis.

The presence of systematic and mature processes, techniques, and tools helps to enhance the maintainability of software. Organizational objectives describe how to demonstrate the return on investment of software maintenance activities.

Initial software development is usually project-based, with a defined time scale and budget. The main emphasis is to deliver a product that meets user needs on time and within budget. In contrast, software maintenance often has the objective of extending the life of software for as long as possible. In addition, it may be driven by the need to meet user demand for software updates and enhancements.

In both cases, the return on investment is much less clear, so that the view at the senior management level is often that of a major activity consuming significant resources with no clear quantifiable benefit for the organization.

Staffing refers to how to attract and keep software maintenance staff. Maintenance is not often viewed as glamorous work.

The software life cycle process is a set of activities, methods, practices, and transformations that people use to develop and maintain software and its associated products.

At the process level, software maintenance activities share much in common with software development for example, software configuration management is a crucial activity in both.

Maintenance also requires several activities that are not found in software development see section 3. These activities present challenges to management.