There’s nothing worse than having a product break while end-users are utilizing it. It damages customer relationships, hurts your reputation, and clogs your help desk with a backlog of customer complaints. That’s the thing about software. It’s never truly “done.”
Software maintenance is just as important as initial development projects. It’s just like purchasing a car; if you don’t maintain your vehicle, it won’t work as expected.
Software maintenance prevents bugs and glitches, enables quicker response times to end-user issues, sustains a healthy relationship with your customers, reduces operating costs, and allows the team to focus on other priorities.
Here’s why maintaining software is critical to your business and how a software maintenance team helps ensure a quality product.
Why Do Businesses Need a Software Maintenance Development Team?
Software maintenance is just as essential as the initial development of your software. It is the process of checking for bugs and software defects, making necessary corrections and improvements, testing the software to ensure it meets requirements, and maintaining records of maintenance activities. Application maintenance is critical because it is the only way to ensure the software you deliver works as expected and meets customers’ needs.
Additional reasons include:
Keeps the Product Updated with the Latest Technology Trends: With new developments in the software industry happening all the time, you will want to keep your software up to date so that you can take advantage of the latest technology and features.
Improves Product Quality: Software maintenance is the process of making sure your software works. It helps ensure you are meeting industry standards and staying competitive in the marketplace.
Improves Customer Satisfaction: Software maintenance helps ensure customers are satisfied with the product they receive.
Helps Avoid Legal Issues: Maintenance helps avoid legal issues by ensuring you are meeting regulatory requirements.
Helps Avoid Security Issues: Maintaining your software through testing, updates, and patches minimizes security risks.
Reduces Cost: Regular maintenance keeps things working optimally to avoid costs associated with rework or excess time to troubleshoot complex issues.
Improves Customer Satisfaction: Software maintenance is not just about fixing bugs; it’s about improving the product. With every new release comes the opportunity to improve on the last one. Updating the software based on customer feedback or market trends increases customer satisfaction.
Leads to Better Business Scalability: As your organization grows, you will have more things to manage, like a growing product inventory or increased customer support volume. Software maintenance helps optimize products for improved performance, which in turn leads to business scalability.
How Does a Software Maintenance Team Help?
A software maintenance team is a group of individuals who work together to maintain software products for a company or organization. The team often consists of developers, testers, quality assurance personnel, technical writers, database administrators, network administrators, system administrators, customer service representatives, and others who work together to make sure a product meets customer needs and stays up to date with technology trends.
When it comes to building your maintenance team, there are a few important skills the team needs:
Strong Product Knowledge: Knowledgeable about the product.
Efficient Communication Skills: To assist customers with questions and problems via phone, email, and other forms of communication.
Open-Minded: Open to exploring new tools that could help improve functionality and accelerate scalability.
Proactive: Ability to address customer issues as they arise, rather than waiting for customer complaints.
Sense of Urgency: Provides timely resolution to customer issues.
Committed to Learning: Stays aware of and up-to-date on new developments within the software industry.
Disaster Recovery Knowledge: Knowledge of disaster recovery resolution, security issues, and software backup planning.
Has the Appropriate Skillset: Understands the programming languages necessary; understands the tools needed to update/test/automate any parts of the application.