Maintenance

Software applications MUST be enhanced and updated on consistent basis to reflect the improvements and innovation of an organization's core business

It is a necessity for businesses to continually improve and expand internal business processes in order to better serve their clients and keep the competitive edge over competition. This notion is also applied to custom software applications, where prolonged software stagnancy can shorten the lifespan of the entire application, resulting in loss of business productivity and efficiency. To get the most out of a software application and to get the best return on total cost of ownership (TCO), Nextstone provides a positive evolutionary change for your existing custom software applications in order to support your most up-to-date business processes.

Nextstone's Application Maintenance Services

Custom application maintenance services by Nextstone will free-up IT resources, allow your organization to focus it's attention on core business. Most importantly we provide you with an information technology partner possessing the knowledge and expertise that will help your organization's overall technology growth, eventually supporting productivity and efficiency for your organization's core business.

A successful piece of software tends to be subjected to a succession of changes, resulting in an increase in the number of requirements. This is based on the premise that as the software becomes useful, users tend to experiment with new cases beyond the scope for which the application was initially developed. Software maintenance is not just "bug fixing", but a number of processes, practices, and activities that conform to an evolutionary development of a software application. This evolution of software application consists of:

• Corrective software maintenance for fixing any issues or defects reported by users.
• Adaptive software maintenance for adapting the software to changes in the environment, such as hardware, operating system, or other conditions and influences such as changes in business rules, government policies, work pattern etc.
• Perfective software maintenance for improving performance and stability of software application, including functional enhancement and cosmetic enhancement (user interface).
• Preventive software maintenance for increasing the system's maintainability, such as updating documentation, adding comments to existing code, and improving the modular structure of the system. Also, finding and correcting problems or potential problems before they are noticed by users.

Nextstone's Software Maintenance Process

Nextstone's software maintenance process comprises of prioritized requested feature list, whether it is a defect found by user or an enhancement request. Once, these requests are prioritized we split complex requested features into smaller tasks (iteration features). Some of the requested feature will only require one iteration (can be implemented as one task without breaking up the feature implementation in many smaller tasks). However, complex features will be broken up into smaller tasks, planned and developed, evaluated and tested, until we reach the desired state of the feature. This process not only helps in quality maintenance, but the turn around time for the requested feature is quick.

Corrective, adaptive, and perfective maintenance are usually initiated by a technically inclined individual within the organization by "opening a ticket" or reporting a bug in a bug tracking system. Preventive maintenance will be initiated by Nextstone, as requested by your organization.

Please contact us today to discuss how we can help you in maintaining your critical business software, increase productivity and efficiency in your internal business processes.