January 23, 2020

Application maintenance and support are key aspects to ensure the application continue to create value to the customers and performs beyond the production deployment. Maintaining the application properly would extend the life of the application beyond its expectancy.  Using Corrective, Preventive, Defective and Perfective approach, the issues and enhancements can identified, prioritized, fixed and corrected appropriately in a timely manner.

Defective – Defective maintenance is a tactical or reactive approach in addressing a fault or an issue. The issue may be a critical or high severity issue, which requires immediate resolution. For example, adding more memory to a memory leak problem may temporarily address an issue, but it requires more in depth corrective action to resolve permanently.

Corrective – Corrective maintenance is focused on correcting a problem or fault that is already existing in the system. The problem may be relating to an error in the system, poor performance or the system that does not conforms to customer requirements. This require more step by step process in identifying and resolving the issue permanently. By performing corrective actions, we can bring back the system to normal operations.

Preventive – Preventive maintenance is a proactive approach in identifying and correcting the problem before it happens. Different types of monitoring such as infrastructure, performance, security and application can be set to proactively identify abnormality in the system, and correct it.

Perfective  – Application are typically installed to satisfy customer requirements for years to come. During the lifetime of the application, the technology or customer business process may evolve. This requires enhancements to the existing system. The perfective approach ensure taking appropriate steps updating the system to keep up with the changes.

Things to consider:

• Defect management – process to identify, prioritize, document, resolve and rollout defects. Defect management tools such as JIRA, Microsoft TFS, etc. has the inbuilt workflows to manage defects effectively.
• Release management – depending upon the severity of the issues, different release approach may be required. A critical issue that require immediately resolution may require an immediate hotfix. The release management must also address how the changes will be rolled out to different environments.
• Cost of quality – the cost of quality includes all the cost involved in identifying, correcting, testing and deploying into the production environment. Fixing defects in the live environment significantly increases the cost. Hence, identifying and resolving issues at the earliest would help reducing overall maintenance cost.

• Web/digital CMS – WordPress, Drupal, Canvas, Squarespace, Weebly, Wix
• Enterprise Content Management – Microsoft SharePoint, Documentum, FileNet, IBM Enterprise Content Manager, Oracle webcenter

TEAM COMPOSITION

Application maintenance and support requires business, application and technical knowledge to address different types of issues that emerge during the application lifetime. Depending upon the maturity, complexity and criticality of the application, the maintenance team include one or many business analysts, developers, testers and deployment engineer.

Disclaimer: The details provided in this page for information purpose only. Please use the details at your discretion. We will continue to improve the information provide as we see fit.