Real-World Software Maintenance

Maintaining software is something that happens consistently throughout any products lifetime. The average lifespan of software is approximately 6 to 10 years. This is a long time for any product to be on the market. As a product ages, it will need to adapt and evolve to the current market needs. The average product life cycle is 3 to 4 months. Having a frequent product life cycle will help the product adapt to the real-world environment.

The typical software will go anywhere between 20 to 50 iterations before it has reached software maturity. The definition of software maturity is when the software can no longer evolve. The question that most people have about software maturity is “how to I know when my software can no longer evolve?” A software can no longer evolve when its hosted platform is no longer support by the manufacture or when its core language is not supported by the software community.

Software sometimes is only as good as the hardware it runs on. When a hardware platform such as a phone, tablet or computer becomes out dated and not supported by the manufacture no more, then your software on those devices also becomes out dated and it is not feasible to support your software anymore.

Software Development Life Cycle

The software development life cycle is similar to our own life cycle. The software is create and brought into this world, then it will mature and gain experience. Eventually the software will become very productive and pass its greatest assets to the next generation then cease to exist. All developers are well versed in the software development life cycle. We all know that nothing lasts forever and that over time everything will change.

The software development life cycle may change based on the platform it was designed for. With today’s current technologies changing at an accelerated rate, we are sometimes forced to adapt quicker than most would like. Since Apple has released the iPhone, they have updated their devices and operating system once every year. This gives us the minimum life cycle for any Apple product to be once per year as well. What this life cycle dictates to the developer is that every year we must release an updated version of the software to make it compatible to the latest operating system and devices.

Google also produces its own operating system called Android. Unlike apple it will produce smaller variants 3 times per every major operating system release. Now although it is updating its operating system three times in one year, this does not mean that you have to follow the same software development life cycle. With Google’s Android operating system, you can still have the minimum lifecycle of one time per year.

What about the website life cycle. A website gets placed on a server that can run the same operating system for a decade without ever shutting down. This makes you think that you will never need to update or put your website into a software development life cycle. This is false. In fact websites undergo more lifecycle changes that almost any other software out there.

Websites are designed around its content. In order for you to attract new visitors, your content must be relevant. Also most web visitors are coming from many different type of devices with different screen sizes. Websites need to be dynamic in the way it displays on a different screen size. This term is called mobile responsive.

Websites also have another factor that most users never consider. This is that all websites must be viewed in a web browser. Today there are hundreds of different browsers and browser versions that each and every website must be coded to support. After all it is very important for your website to have the same customer satisfaction no matter what screen size and browser that your users choose to use. Having a bad experience will decrease your user based and make your website irrelevant.

• Planning - Gathering all of the requirements for the cycle
• Analysis - Produce a time line based on the requirements
• Design - create a strategy on how the changes will integrate
• Implementation - develop the changes
• Test - Make sure that none of the changes break exisiting functionality
• Evaluation - Deploy to a small number of users
• Release - Distribute to the public
• Support - Support the software and make notes of all issues