SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (MAINTENANCE) CSJMU

        Software Maintenance 

Software Maintenance is the process of modifying a software product after it has been delivered to the customer. The main purpose of software maintenance is to modify and update software applications after delivery to correct faults and to improve performance. 

Need for Maintenance – 

Software Maintenance must be performed in order to: 

• Correct faults.

• Improve the design.

• Implement enhancements.

• Interface with other systems.

• Accommodate programs so that different hardware, software, system features, and telecommunications facilities can be used.

• Migrate legacy software.

• Retire software.

Challenges in Software Maintenance:

The various challenges in software maintenance are given below:

• The popular age of any software program is taken into consideration up to ten to fifteen years. As software program renovation is open ended and might maintain for decades making it very expensive.

• Older software program’s, which had been intended to paintings on sluggish machines with much less reminiscence and garage ability can not maintain themselves tough in opposition to newly coming more advantageous software program on contemporary-day hardware.

• Changes are frequently left undocumented which can also additionally reason greater conflicts in future.

• As era advances, it turns into high priced to preserve vintage software program.

• Often adjustments made can without problems harm the authentic shape of the software program, making it difficult for any next adjustments.

Categories of Software Maintenance – 

Maintenance can be divided into the following: 

 

1. Corrective maintenance: 

Corrective maintenance of a software product may be essential either to rectify some bugs observed while the system is in use, or to enhance the performance of the system. 

 

2. Adaptive maintenance: 

This includes modifications and updations when the customers need the product to run on new platforms, on new operating systems, or when they need the product to interface with new hardware and software. 

 

3. Perfective maintenance: 

A software product needs maintenance to support the new features that the users want or to change different types of functionalities of the system according to the customer demands. 

 

4. Preventive maintenance: 

This type of maintenance includes modifications and updations to prevent future problems of the software. It goals to attend problems, which are not significant at this moment but may cause serious issues in future. 

 

Reverse Engineering – 

Reverse Engineering is processes of extracting knowledge or design information from anything man-made and reproducing it based on extracted information. It is also called back Engineering. 

 

Software Reverse Engineering is the process of recovering the design and the requirements specification of a product from an analysis of it’s code. Reverse Engineering is becoming important, since several existing software products, lack proper documentation, are highly unstructured, or their structure has degraded through a series of maintenance efforts. 

Why Reverse Engineering? 

• Providing proper system documentation.

• Recovery of lost information.

• Assisting with maintenance.

• Facility of software reuse.

• Discovering unexpected flaws or faults.

Used of Software Reverse Engineering – 

• Software Reverse Engineering is used in software design, reverse engineering enables the developer or programmer to add new features to the existing software with or without knowing the source code.

• Reverse engineering is also useful in software testing, it helps the testers to study the virus and other malware code