So now you have an idea about What is application maintenance? and What is the process of application maintenance? Now let’s dig deeper into the types of application maintenance. Application maintenance is a constant process and there are various situations occurring day by day. These situations are the new challenges for your application. Every challenge has to be dealt with proper care and with necessary changes which are required according to the challenge. The developers dealt with these challenges on the basis of four types of measures. They are elaborated as follows:

Types of Application Maintenance

1. Corrective measures
2. Adaptive measures
3. Preventive measures
4. Perfective measures

• Corrective measures

Corrective measure includes a modification of application for a known problem. This type of measure deals with the defects in the application like bug fixing, modification of a part of code, and many more types of defects. Corrective measures are generally allocating with the defects of application. Which results in quick updates on a recurring basis.

The defects of the application may affect the user experience. These defects occur in a specific part of the application so it is not known to a bigger audience. The defect becomes known when the defect has existed for a longer period of time and users have become adaptive to these defects. Once the defect is fixed, if the user has become adaptive with the defect after its modification the user might have a negative impact on the application.

The defects should be addressed quickly so that there is no negative impact on the application. This measure helps the application functioning running according to the user experience and can helps in offsetting the future problems occurring in the application.

• Adaptive measures

These defects are occurring due to the external factors of the application like compatible with the latest operating, introduction of a new version of the operating system, any hardware modification. These defects are occurring due to the changes in environment of the application. These changes occur with a greater frequency and if not addressed quickly the application might become outdated.

Adaptive measures does not affect the application directly. These changes affect the compatible of application for a  specific platform. These changes have a low impact on user experience because the primary focus of the user is application functioning. By adapting these changes according to the latest technology this may result in slight enhancement of performance such as speed and scalability of the application but the overall functioning of the application remains the same.

• Preventive measures

Preventive measures are the preparation of change to meet the future goals. These measures are also known as future proofing. These changes include performance enhancement of the application for meeting increasing demand of the application. This measures deals with the latent faults in their initial stage if not dealt with, they might become operational faults.

Preventive measures are generally transparent to the user because the changes are the preparation for the near future. Example: the application is running absolutely fine in the market and becoming popular day by day. The developers know that the server has the capacity of handling 1000 users. Because the application has become more popular the application will cross this mark of 1000 users in the near feature. For this mark the developers are preparing for expanding the server capacity for 5000 users. This preparation is called preventive measure.

• Perfective measures

Perfective measures make changes in the usability and functionalities of the application. Perfective measures include addition of new features, refinement of existing features, and many more changes. These measures have the largest categories of changes. Perfective measures also include changes in the user experience and changing the look of the application. Changes in the interface of the application are the part of perfective measures.

The perfective measures sometimes result in eliciting protest form the users because the back end changes are noticeable but the front end changes are visible to the users and sometimes it also impacts on the user experience. For this reasons the perfective measures require greater communication to cover-up the user sentiments. Generally this measures are communicated through feedback, promoting the new features and by providing accessible support to the users.

Summary

This all measures are solutions for application maintenance. The root cause of this measure is compatibility of application across all the platforms throughout the application life cycle. Corrective measures generally include bug fixes. Adaptive measures include adaptation of applications according to the latest operating system. Preventive measures are the preparation of applications for meeting the future goals. Perfective measures include change in functionality, add on of a new feature or changing the look of the application.