Types of maintenance
The four types of maintenance in ISO/IEC 14764, their share of the effort, Lehman's laws and how a change request is handled.
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Software maintenance: what is it?
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All the changes made to software after its delivery, to fix its faults, adapt it to its environment or improve it.
It starts at delivery and lasts as long as the software lives: it is usually the longest and most expensive phase of its life cycle.
A user reports that the PDF export crashes when the customer's name contains an apostrophe. What type of maintenance is fixing this crash?
- Corrective
- Adaptive
- Perfective
- Preventive
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Corrective
A fault observed in production and repaired: that is the definition of corrective maintenance. A change is not 'perfective' just because the result improves: what counts is what triggers it.
ISO/IEC 14764 distinguishes four types of maintenance: …, adaptive, perfective and ….
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ISO/IEC 14764 distinguishes four types of maintenance: corrective, adaptive, perfective and preventive.
Two of these types react to an event (an observed fault, a change of environment); two act ahead with no triggering event (improving the software, fixing a latent fault before the failure).
Corrective maintenance: what is it?
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A change made after delivery to repair an observed fault: a crash, a wrong result, behaviour that contradicts the specification.
It answers a symptom a user has already met. It is the type everyone imagines, but not the most frequent one.