Product maintenance and support

For most product managers, the day their product is actually released into the market is end of product development activity. The scary thing, though, is that product release isn't the end; it's usually only the beginning of a long maintenance and upgrade cycle. In fact this the stage where most of the products spends their majority of life-period.

Once a product is out in the market, managers need to begin thinking about how to incorporate the feedback they receive into the next version of the product, to improve usability, user-friendliness, features and overall value.

Software product maintenance activities can be broadly classified into

• Corrective Maintenance- Reactive modification to correct discovered problems.
• Adaptive Maintenance- Modification to keep it usable in a changed or changing environment.
• Perfective Maintenance- Improve performance or maintainability.
• Preventive Maintenance- Modification to detect and correct latent faults.

Most enterprise products face a problem in supporting their installed base on legacy versions of the product. Software product maintenance need may arise to

• Correct errors
• Correct requirements and design flaws
• Improve the design
• Make enhancements
• Interface with other systems
• Convert to use other hardware
• Migrate legacy systems
• Retire systems
• Maintaining control over the system's day-to-day functions
• Maintaining control over system modification
• Perfecting existing acceptable functions
• Prevent system performance from degrading to unacceptable levels

A significant investment needs to be made to maintain multiple versions of an old code-base, many times on legacy technology platform to support existing clients until they can be persuaded to migrate to newer versions of the product.

Considering our client requirements and inherent challenges in software product maintenance,we have devised innovative software product maintenance process model which focuses on

• Process implementation
  • Development of maintenance plans and procedures
  • Establishing procedures for modification requests
  • Implementing the CM (configuration management) process
• Problem and modification tasks
  • Initial analysis
  • Problem Verification
  • Developing options for implementing the modification
  • Documenting the results
  • Obtaining approval for modification option
• Modification implementation task
  • Performing detailed analysis
  • Development, coding, and test of modification requests
• Maintenance Review/Acceptance tasks
  • Conduct reviews
  • Obtain approval for modification
• Migration tasks
  • Development of migration plan
  • Notify users of migration plan
  • Conduct parallel operations
  • Notify user that migration has started
  • Conduct post-operation review
  • Ensure that old data is accessible
• Software retirement tasks
  • Develop a retirement plan
  • Notify users of retirement plan
  • Conduct parallel operations
  • Notify user that retirement has started
  • Ensure that old data is accessible

e-Zest carefully outlines service level agreements (SLAs) requirements, customizing our maintenance process for unique client needs. We bring to each project a strong methodology for application maintenance, based on customized application maintenance and support methodology and our own proprietary Quality Management System(QMS)which is in line with CMMI processes.

Software product vendors can use our offshore maintenance services to continue to maintain their current products along with new application developments using flexible business models provided by e-Zest.They can manage the ramp-up and scale-down of efforts that are required for peaks and troughs that are typical of a product over its maintenance cycle.

e-Zest enables you to deliver on your global initiatives at lower costs and drive future business growth.