Software Maintenance and Support
Types, Costs, Tools, and Required Skills
With 15+ years of overall experience in IT and software maintenance and support, Livyoung Realtech Enterprise helps companies set up and run preventive maintenance and on-demand support of applications and their infrastructures.
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The Essence of Software Maintenance and Support
Software maintenance and support refer to a collection of operations aimed at ensuring the stability, scalability, high performance, and security of software.
Maintenance and support efforts for software are categorized into four categories:
Corrective:
Addressing issues that users have noticed or that have been identified through monitoring.
Adaptive:
keeping software up to date by fine-tuning it to meet changing business requirements.
Perfectionist:
always improving the usability, performance, and reliability of software.
Preventive:
Measures include recognizing and fixing hidden problems.
Estimating the scope and required resources, designing the maintenance and support process, selecting a sourcing model, implementation, and launch are all elements in the software support and maintenance setup plan.
Help desk professionals, application support engineers, software developers, QA and DevOps engineers are all required members of the team.
Software Support and Maintenance Setup Plan
Depending on the characteristics of the supported software and its underlying infrastructure, as well as the breadth of the required support and maintenance activities, the setup strategy will vary.
We explain some general procedures that are indicative of all IT software support and maintenance activities based on Livyoung Realtech’s extensive experience in software support and maintenance.
Step 1: Estimation of the support and maintenance scope and required resource
Duration: 1 week (in-house), 2-4 weeks (outsourced)
To evaluate the breadth of the support and maintenance tasks, examine the software’s connected infrastructure, potential new features, and improvements, as well as the current and planned user pool.
Assess the scope of the project versus current in-house resources, such as dedicated IT specialists and maintenance tools.
Consider how important it is to keep track of your support process and workers.
Step 2: Software support and maintenance process desig
Duration: 4 weeks
Depending on the scope of the required support and maintenance activities, the processes will comprise a combination of the following elements:
Reactive support (on-demand)
End user support (L1) :
Solving usage issues and minor problems, escalating more complex issues
Application support (L2) :
Software troubleshooting, fixing its performance, configuration, and security issues.
Development support (L3/L4) :
fixing software issues on the code and database level, customization, adding new features, software integration.
Proactive support (continuous)
Software availability, performance, security, compliance monitoring and management,
QA activities (including regular code reviews),
Infrastructure optimization (e.g., cloud resource consumption optimization).
Depending on the activities you’ll include in your support and maintenance process, you need to define KPIs to assess and optimize the process.
Our best practice: We map the software support and maintenance process in compliance with international technical standards set by ISO and IEC and take into consideration relevant security and privacy standards (e.g., GDPR and HIPAA).
Step 3: Choosing a sourcing model and implementation
Model 1: in-house software maintenance
- Hiring and training staff for software support and maintenance
Duration: 4-8 weeks
- Tool selection and customization
Duration: 1-4 weeks
The type of software, the breadth of support and maintenance, the KPIs you’re interested in, and other factors should all be considered when selecting tools.
Software for performance and security monitoring, backup software, DevOps, help desk, and other tools may be included in the toolset.
The majority of the time, support and maintenance tools must be customized.
Our Best Practices:
We select tools for application performance monitoring that provide information on programme CPU and memory utilization, transaction profiling, response time and request rates, and how an app handles poor network connectivity, among other things.
Because many maintenance and support tools are versatile and cater to a variety of applications, we tailor them to meet the unique maintenance and support requirements.
Model 2: outsourced software maintenance
Vendor selection
Duration: up to 12 weeks
To choose the right vendor, we suggest:
Examining top software development company listings reveals that 90% of them provide maintenance services.
Shortlisting 3-5 firms based on their ITSM and DevOps methods, as well as applicable qualifications, such as ITIL, Microsoft certifications (e.g., MSP, MCSA), cloud provider certifications (e.g., AWS Certified Solution Architect, Certified SysOps Administrator), and Red Hat certifications.
Creating and delivering a request for proposal (RFP) detailing your software support and maintenance requirements.
Obtaining customised proposals from various vendors and evaluating their approaches to your software maintenance project, as well as essential knowledge
Step 4: Software maintenance and support launch
Duration: 1-2 days
Set the service timeframes (e.g., 8/5, 12/5, 24/5, 24/7) before starting the maintenance and support process.
Regular maintenance windows for preventative maintenance tasks that can create downtimes should also be scheduled. Even if they aren’t used every time, these time intervals should always be available.
Our best practice: To schedule maintenance windows on Sundays for the production environment where end-users work. We set maintenance windows regularly during the night hours for the non-production environment that is only used for testing, for example.
Consider Professional Software Support Services
Software support and maintenance consulting
Your maintenance and support project's feasibility study.
The software maintenance method is being designed.
Developing a software support and maintenance launch plan.
Selecting an appropriate sourcing model.
Choosing the best combination of tools for software support and maintenance.
Outsourced software support and maintenance
Forms of service:
L1/L2 assistance (service desk).
L3/L4 (L3/L4) (development support).
L1/L2/L3/L4/L5/L6/L7/L8/L9 (end-to-end support).
Proactive software monitoring (performance, security), with the goal of finding and resolving hidden problems.
We also provide infrastructure support and maintenance:
Types of requests include consultations, requests for changes, and issues.
SLA that guarantees:
Response time varies based on the severity of the request: Critical (30m-1h), High (4-8h), Medium (24h), Low (30m-1h), Critical (30m-1h), Critical (30m-1h), Critical (30m-1h), Critical (48-72h).
Each day, up to six important requests are processed.
Human Resources Required for Software Support Maintenance
The team may contain a variety of IT specialists, ranging from developers to UI designers, depending on the extent of software support and maintenance. The backbone specialists required for the project, which includes both on-demand and continuous support tasks, are listed below:
SUPPORT TASKS
Help desk specialists
Receiving, registering and tracking queries from software users.
Solving simple and repeating issues (e.g., username and password problems, installing newly released patches and service packs.
Escalating unsolved issues to L2/L3.
Application support engineers
Receiving, registering and tracking queries from software users.
Fixing application performance issues.
Resolving software configuration and account administration issues.
Log investigation for root cause analysis of issues.
Database administration.
Software developers
Fixing issues on the code and database level
Creating new software components or features.
Implementing software customizations, integrations and migration.
Unit testing.
Test engineers
Functional, regression, integration, and other types of testing considering implemented updates, upgrades and other software changes.
DevOps engineers
Automating the software’s change implementation and evolution using the CI/CD approach.
Managing physical and virtual servers and their configurations.
Configuring and optimizing cloud services.
Log investigation for root cause analysis of issues.
Solving infrastructure issues.
Sourcing Models for Software Support and Maintenance
In-house support and maintenance
Gives you complete control over the support and maintenance process, but comes with hazards related to setup and management, such as inaccurate support and maintenance scope estimation.
In addition, an in-house team requires ongoing training and, on average, greater wages than outsourced specialists, which can be costly.
Outsourced support and maintenance
Provides external software maintenance management and access to a wide range of external specialists’ skills, lowering support and maintenance expenses.
If your firm is governed by governmental or industry-specific regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, SOX, GLBA, and others, it may pose a security concern.
Mixed model
Combines in-house software maintenance management with entirely or partially outsourced resources, allowing you to keep full or partial control over the process while lowering costs.
Software Maintenance and Support Costs
The support and maintenance costs vary a lot depending on the sourcing model. The key cost factors for in-house and outsourced software support maintenance respectively are:
In-house software maintenance
The amount and type of software and technologies employed, including legacy technologies, integrations, and adaptations.
The degree of automation and the complexity of the organization's digital infrastructure.
Licenses for the team's tools, such as software monitoring, configuration, and support desk, among others.
Maintenance requires the availability of thorough and high-quality programme documentation.
The amount and type of software and technologies employed, including legacy technologies, integrations, and adaptations.
Outsourced software maintenance
The size and expertise of the outsourced crew.
The pricing strategy (per ticket, bucket of hours).
Maintenance and support services are available in a variety of forms (on-demand, continuous, both).
The number of tickets that have been submitted to the assistance desk (agreed and extra).
The real workload of a team member, for example, 5 FTE (168h*5), 1 FTE (168h), 0.25 FTE (40h).
Time coverage for support and maintenance (e.g., 8-5, 12-5, 24/5, 24/7).
Want to Know Your Maintenance and Support Costs?
Our team is ready to calculate the costs depending on your software and its underlying infrastructure, the scope of support and maintenance activities required, and the preferred pricing model.
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