Maintenance includes activities like keeping the system up to date with the changes in the organization and ensuring it meets the goals of the organization by:
· Building a help desk to support the system users – having a team available to aid technical difficulties and answer questions
· Implementing changes to the system when necessary.
System maintenance involves the monitoring, evaluating and modifying of a system to make desirable or necessary improvements. In other words, maintenance includes enhancements, modifications or any change from the original specifications. Therefore, the information analyst should take change as his/her responsibility so as to keep the functioning at an acceptable level.
Software needs to be maintained not because some of its modules or programs wear out and need to be replaced, but because there are often some residual errors remaining in the system which have to be removed as soon they are discovered. This is an on-going process, until the system stabilizes.
Maintaining and enhancing software to cope with newly discovered problems or new requirements can take far more time than the initial development of the software. Not only may it be necessary to add code that does not fit the original design but just determining how software works at some point after it is completed may require significant effort by a software engineer. About ⅔ of all software engineering work is maintenance, but this statistic can be misleading. A small part of that is fixing bugs. Most maintenance is extending systems to do new things, which in many ways can be considered new work.
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