Building new features is exciting. You get to imagine a future version of your platform, see it come to life and be able to deliver genuine impact to your customers. But it’s easy to get caught up in “what’s next” instead of taking the time to care for what you’ve already built. In reality, good software needs time for maintenance, but at scale it becomes critical for success. With added complexity and higher stakes, let’s talk about the importance of software maintenance at scale.
What Counts as Software Maintenance?
Software maintenance is work you perform on your platform where the goal isn’t to introduce anything new. Instead, it aims to fix, refine or upgrade what already exists to ensure it continues to work into the future. There are two main times you’d perform maintenance are:
- Proactively: preventative maintenance carried out before anything goes wrong. Things like, infrastructure updates, dependency management, writing more tests, refactoring code, improve efficiency or fixing bugs.
- Reactively: corrective maintenance addresses the impacts of an event. If a bug is reported or an outage occurs, this kind of maintenance aims to get the system back to the status quo as quickly as possible.
Both types of maintenance are vital for custom software at scale. Digital products in today’s era don’t live in a vacuum, so any change in any dependency can cause your platform to break, and you need to be ready for that. Thus the greater your scale, the more complex your software will be, and users will expect your platform to keep working.
What Happens to Unmaintained Software
Unmaintained software will start to fail over time. For example, if you are integrating with an external API, you are relying on that service to stay the same indefinitely. Spoiler: that isn’t going to happen. So when it’s updated, deprecated or changed in some other way, you need to be able to quickly adapt and update your platform.
Over time, unfixed issues will compound the effect of future problems. These could be anything like:
- Users updating their operating system or software might cause your platform to break when as old features are deprecated or even removed.
- Any vulnerabilities found will remain active, putting your users at risk.
- As issues compound, their effects become unpredictable.
- Even your product looking old could discourage new users from becoming customers.
How Scale Plays a Factor
An increase in scale makes software maintenance more important for three core reasons:
1. Disruptions Have Greater Impact
The impacts of small software failures are limited. But the more users you have — and the more features you implement — the more customers rely on your platform for business-critical operations. This makes any type of disruption more disastrous for your customers.
At scale, proactive work needs to be both frequent and risk-aware. Safeguards must be in place to stop existing functionality breaking with new changes. Further, you need to be able to act swiftly in the event of a disruption to shield your customers from the greatest impacts.
2. Higher Levels of Tech Debt
Technical debt is nigh on unavoidable at scale. With any new feature you build, this silent debt is likely building in the shadows. Things like architectural shortcuts, coupled components or duplicated functionality can make both building new and updating existing features harder. And today, AI might be supercharging the debt.
You must address tech debt consciously, but it’s not easy. Especially with legacy systems, old architectural decisions can make modern day development a nightmare for teams. Instead, you need to chip away at it slowly, in the background, with guardrails in place to limit negative consequences.
3. Optimisation Become A Necessity
Scale shows weakness in all systems, and a key weakness at scale is performance. As more users store more data and send more requests, you’re suddenly hit with ballooning response times or outright timeouts. So with scale, you’ll need to optimise your code to ensure smooth, dependable and acceptable performance.
The key to knowing what to optimise is metrics; without them, you’ll be going in blind. Metrics can surface the real-world impacts of slowdowns and failures, giving you a clear picture on what to focus on. However, sometimes there is little you can do to improve your software’s performance, which is where horizontal or vertical scaling comes in.
What Does Effective Software Maintenance at Scale Look Like
At scale, effective software maintenance comes down to your ability to stay on top of issues, fix them, and keep everything up to date. To perform effective maintenance and scale, you must:
- Having a solid plan. This should detail your priorities, how maintenance should be carried out and how quality assurance steps will mitigate regressions. It’s arguably the most important step as without it you’ll be in the dark.
- Keep security at the front of mind. Loosing functionality is one thing, but compromising data is another — leaks can be devastating for businesses and consumers alike. Getting this right is critical, so give it the care and attention it deserves.
- Work on making an impact. Through adaptive maintenance, what you work on depends on what’s going on. Prioritise high-impact changes: a misaligned button should be fixed, but not yet if there are still critical issues.
- Build users’ trust. When things go wrong — which they will inevitably will — your users need to trust you’ll do the right thing. Be transparent about mistakes and show how you’re genuinely making improvements.
- Scale your maintenance as your software does. Smaller software doesn’t need the same maintenance scale as larger platforms. So ensure you continually re-evaluate whether your maintenance dollars are enough for your current scale, and expand them when needed.
- Don’t forget to build new things too. At large scales, any software team could spend the rest of eternity looking a tickets, fixing bugs and writing changes. So make sure you keep time for building new things too, otherwise competitors will have a big chance to supersede you.
At FONSEKA, maintenance is a core to our service. We understand that software small or big needs to be taken care of. Whether you’re looking to build something new and care about longevity, or have existing software that needs to be maintained, we’re ready to help — get in touch today!