Maintenance service. Five years ago, I wasn’t familiar with that word.
However, my first five years in the software industry have made the meaning of that word more than clear to me. Namely, I have spent more than half of that time as a member of the maintenance team of several software products and, most recently, as a leader.
Sometimes in the software world, it was thought that a finished application is like an iron plow; once forged, and good to use forever after that. However, the ever-evolving software industry has made us realize that isn’t true.
A finished application starts to accumulate technical debt very quickly. If the debt is not actively managed, a critical application to the organization may soon become vulnerable.
Technical debt can start to accumulate for an application at many different levels. It can gather into the code, the libraries used, the application framework, and the programming language version. The list could be continued even further, up to the servers and their parts and the browser version chosen by the user.
Maintenance goes hand in hand with software usability and security
The task of the maintenance team is to ensure that the applications remain usable and secure. Over the years, we have e.g.
- have updated the application authentications to a more secure one (e.g., suomi.fi).
- updated the version of the used programming language to a newer one while making the necessary changes to the code and libraries.
- built an archiving function that keeps the application fast.
- moved an entire application to the Azure cloud service.
The changes to the application’s functions planned together with our customers have brought years of good active usage time to some applications. With the help of integrations, we have also reduced manual data copying between systems.
We use the term development and maintenance for our service because, in addition to maintenance, we want to help our customers develop the functionality of the applications to meet today’s needs.
Has your organization’s application become slow, or have you noticed that it needs to be updated or developed? Book an appointment from our CEO’s calendar and tell us about your situation. We are happy to help.
