Software Maintenance

By
Dr. J.V. Joshua
 Introduction
• Software development efforts result in the delivery of a software
product that satisfies user requirements. Accordingly, the software
product must change or evolve.
• Once in operation, defects are uncovered, operating environments
change, and new user requirements surface.
• The maintenance phase of the life cycle begins following a warranty
period or post-implementation support delivery
 Introduction cont.
• Software maintenance is an integral part of a software life cycle.
However, it has not received the same degree of attention that the
other phases have.
• Historically, software development has had a much higher profile
than software maintenance in most organisations. This is now
changing, as organisations strive to squeeze the most out of their
software development investment by keeping software operating as
long as possible.
• The open source paradigm has brought further attention to the issue
of maintaining software artifacts developed by others
 Introduction cont.
• Software maintenance is defined as the totality of activities required
to provide cost-effective support to software system.
• The objective of software maintenance is to modify existing software
while preserving its integrity.
• Software maintenance sustains the software product throughout its
life cycle (from development to operations).
 Maintenance Models
• Three process reuse oriented models have been proposed:
1. Quick fix model
2. Iterative enhancement model
3. Full reuse model
 Maintenance Models
1. Quick fix model: In this model, necessary changes are
quickly made to the code and then to the accompanying
documentation.
Quick fix model steps:
i. source code is modified to fix the problem;
ii. necessary changes are made to the relevant documents; and
iii. the new code is recompiled to produce a new version
 Maintenance Models cont.
2. Iterative enhancement model: In this model, first changes
are made to the highest level documents. Eventually, changes
are propagated down to the code level.
The model works as follows:
• It begins with the existing system’s artifacts, namely, requirements, design, code,
test, and analysis documents.
• It revises the highest-level documents affected by the changes and propagates
the changes down through the lower-level documents.
• The model allows maintainers to redesign the system, based on the analysis of
the existing system
 Maintenance Models cont.
3. Full reuse model: In this model, a new system is built from
components of the old system and others available in the repository.
• In the full reuse model, reuse is explicit and the following activities
are performed:
• identify the components of the old system that are candidates for reuse
• understand the identified system components.
• modify the old system components to support the new requirements.
• integrate the modified components to form the newly developed system
 Change Mini-Cycle Model
Software change is a process that may
introduce new requirements to the
existing system, or may need to alter
the software system if requirements
are not correctly implemented. In
order to capture this, an evolutionary
model known as change mini-cycle.
Change requests:
• defect report and
• enhancement request

Fig. The change mini-cycle ©Springer, 2008

 Maintenance Models cont.
• Closed Source Software(CSS) System
• systems developed under industrial software process
• proprietary software distributed under a licensing agreement to authorized
users with private modification, copying, and republishing restrictions
• the source code is not shared with the public for anyone to look at or change
• Examples
• Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, McAfee anti-virus, windows OS
 Maintenance Models cont.
• Free and open source software(FOSS)
• It is both free and open
• It is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, copy, study, change, and
improve its design through availability of its source code
• The FOSS movement is attributed to Richard Stallman, who started the GNU
project in 1984, and a supporting organization, the Free Software Foundation
• GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix", chosen because GNU's design is
Unix-like, but differs from Unix by being free software and containing no Unix code
• Examples
• Mozilla Firefox web browser, PHP, Python, Apache, Open office
• Commercial off-the-shelf(COTS)
• software that are ready-made and available for sale to the general public
• For example, Microsoft Office is a COTS product that is a packaged software
solution for businesses
• Outlook
• Accounting software e.g. Sage. Tally, Quickbook,Navision etc.
• Games
 Maintenance Models cont.
• The Staged Model for CSS
• The Staged Model for FOSS
 Maintenance Models cont.
• Rajlich and Bennett defined a simple staged model to represent the
traditional commercial Closed Source Software (CSS) life cycle.
• Their model comprises a sequence of five stages
• initial development. Develop the first functioning version of the software.
• Evolution. The developers improve the functionalities and capabilities of the
software to meet the needs and expectations of the customer
• Servicing. The developers only fix minor and emergency defects, and no
major functionality is included
• Phaseout. In this phase, no more servicing is undertaken, while the vendors
seek to generate revenue as long as possible
• Closedown. The software is withdrawn from the market, and customers are
directed to migrate to a replacement
Fig. Stage Model CSS
Maintenance Models cont.
 The Staged Model for FOSS
• Three major differences are identified between CSS systems and FOSS systems.
• In Figure below, the rectangle with the label “Initial development” has been visually highlighted because it can be
the only initial development stage in the evolution of FOSS systems. In other words, it does not have any evolution
track for FOSS system.
• With some systems that were analyzed, after a transition from Evolution to Servicing, a new period of evolution
was observed. This possibility is depicted in Figure as a broken arc from the Servicing stage to the Evolution stage.

• In general, the active developers of FLOSS systems get

frequently replaced by new developers. Therefore, the
dashed line in Figure exhibits this possibility of a
transition from Phaseout stage to Evolution stage.

Fig. Stage Model for FOSS

 Need for Maintenance

• Maintenance is needed to ensure that the software continues to

satisfy user requirements.
• Maintenance is applicable to software that is developed using any
software life cycle model (for example, spiral or linear).
• Software products change due to corrective and non-corrective
software actions
 Need for Maintenance cont.
• Maintenance must be performed in order to:
• correct faults
• improve the design
• implement enhancements
• interface with other software
• adapt programs so that different hardware, software, system features, and
telecommunications facilities can be used
• migrate legacy software and
• retire software
 Need for Maintenance cont.
• Five key characteristics comprise the maintainer’s activities
• maintaining control over the software’s day-to-day functions
• maintaining control over software modification
• perfecting existing functions
• identifying security threats and fixing security vulnerabilities and
• preventing software performance from degrading to unacceptable levels
 Costs of Maintenance
• Maintenance consumes a major share of the financial resources in a
software life cycle.
• Reports suggest that the cost of maintenance is high. A study on
estimating software maintenance found that the cost of
maintenance is as high as 67% of the cost of entire software process
cycle
• Understanding the categories of software maintenance helps to
understand the structure of software maintenance costs.
• Also, understanding the factors that influence the maintainability of
software can help to contain costs
Cost of Maintenance cont.
 Cost of Maintenance cont.
• On an average, the cost of software maintenance is more than 50%
of all SDLC phases. There are various factors, which trigger
maintenance cost go high, such as:
• Real-world factors
• Software-end factors
• Real-world factors affecting Maintenance Cost
• The standard age of any software is considered up to 10 to 15 years.
• Older software, which were meant to work on slow machines with less
memory and storage capacity cannot keep themselves challenging against
newly coming enhanced software on modern hardware.
• As technology advances, it becomes costly to maintain old software.
• Most maintenance engineers are newbie and use trial and error method to
rectify problem.
• Often, changes made can easily hurt the original structure of the software,
making it hard for any subsequent changes.
• Changes are often left undocumented which may cause more conflicts in
future
 Cost of Maintenance cont.
• Software-end factors affecting Maintenance Cost
• Structure of Software Program
• Programming Language
• Dependence on external environment(such as policies, competition, process)
• Staff reliability and availability
 Categories of maintenance
Maintenance activities are divided into four groups:
1. Corrective maintenance
2. Adaptive maintenance
3. Perfective maintenance
4. Preventive maintenance
 Software Maintenance

• Corrective maintenance: The purpose of corrective maintenance is to

correct failures: processing failures and performance failures.
• Examples of corrective maintenance:
– A program producing a wrong output is an example of processing failure.
– Similarly, a program not being able to meet real-time requirements is an
example of performance failure.
• The process of corrective maintenance includes isolation and
correction of defective elements in the software.
• There is a variety of situations that can be described as corrective
maintenance such as correcting a program that aborts or produces
incorrect results.
• Basically, corrective maintenance is a reactive process, which means
that corrective maintenance is performed after detecting defects with
the system.
 Software Maintenance

• Adaptive maintenance: The purpose of adaptive maintenance is to

enable the system to adapt to changes in its data environment or
processing environment.
• This process modifies the software to properly interface with a
changing or changed environment.
• Adaptive maintenance includes system changes, additions, deletions,
modifications, extensions, and enhancements to meet the evolving
needs of the environment in which the system must operate.
• Examples of Adaptive maintenance are:
– changing the system to support new hardware configuration;
– converting the system from batch to on-line operation; and
– changing the system to be compatible with other applications.
 Software Maintenance
• Perfective maintenance: The purpose of perfective maintenance is to
make a variety of improvements, namely, user experience, processing
efficiency, and maintainability.
• Examples of perfective maintenance are:
– the program outputs can be made more readable for better user experience;
– the program can be modified to make it faster, thereby increasing the
processing efficiency;
– and the program can be restructured to improve its readability, thereby
increasing its maintainability.
• Activities for perfective maintenance include restructuring of the
code, creating and updating documentations, and tuning the system to
improve performance.
• It is also called “reengineering”.
 Software Maintenance

• Preventive maintenance: The purpose of preventive maintenance is to

prevent problems from occurring by modifying software products.
• Basically, one should look ahead, identify future risks and unknown
problems, and take actions so that those problems do not occur.
• Preventive maintenance is very often performed on safety critical and
high available software systems.
• The concept of “software rejuvenation” is a preventive maintenance
measure to prevent, or at least postpone, the occurrences of failures
(crash) due to continuously running the software system.
• It involves occasionally terminating an application or a system,
cleaning its internal state, and restarting it.
• Rejuvenation may increase the downtime of the application;
however, it prevents the occurrence of more severe failures.
 Software Maintenance cont

In summary
• Corrective: maintaining control over day-to-day
functions
• Adaptive: maintaining control over system
modifications
• Perfective: perfecting existing functions
• Preventive: preventing system performance from
degrading to unacceptable levels
 Software Maintenance Exercises

• One of the credit card companies upgrades its system for

handling credit card payments, and this requires a slight
change to the type of data that the Gas Station Control
System (GSCS) needs to send to it. This situation should
a. lead to a corrective change. b. lead to an adaptive change.
c. lead to a perfective change.
d. lead to a preventive change. e. require no maintenance to
be performed.
 Software Maintenance Exercises

• The gas station owner has stipulated that the GSCS should be
able to handle additional gas pumps, if the station decides to
invest in them in the future. However, the development team
realizes that the way in which it handles concurrency will not
scale up if more gas pumps are added at the gas station. This
situation should:
a. lead to a corrective change. b. lead to an adaptive change. c. lead
to a perfective change.
d. lead to a preventive change. e. require no maintenance to be
performed
 Software Maintenance Exercises

• An additional service is added for customers at the gas

station. (Customers can now rent parking spots.) This
situation should
a. lead to a corrective change. b. lead to an adaptive change.
c. lead to a perfective change.
d. lead to a preventive change. e. require no maintenance to
be performed
 Software Maintenance Exercises

• When receipts are printed, if the customer's name exceeds

a certain length then the purchase price does not fit on the
receipt and is not printed. This situation does not occur
very frequently (at most, once a week). This situation
should:
a. lead to a corrective change. b. lead to an adaptive change.
c. lead to a perfective change.
d. lead to a preventive change. e. require no maintenance to
be performed
 QUIZ 2 Ten minutes
• Indicate the types of maintenance in the following Scenario
1. Isolation and correction of defective elements in the software
_______________
2. Changing the system to support new hardware configuration
________________
3. Converting the system from batch to online operation
___________
4. Restructured programs to improve its readability
____________
5. Restructured program to achieve good styles to make later
program comprehension easier ___________________