This is totally me just being naive, I don’t work in the software realm but do have an interest possibly one day, but if we have stuff that’s been able to run (seemingly) successfully for years, or maybe even decade, what maintenance needs to even be done on old programs? Is this simply for people discovering security vulnerabilities and patching them? Is there more to it than that?
In: Technology
I used to work on a Point of Sale system for a large retailer. We had to change the software for several reasons:
* Emerging security threats (patches would occasionally break things, major exploits require changes to several external libraries that we might be referencing).
* Upgrades of our vendor’s software that broke our code or offered features we wanted to use
* Integrating with systems from partners or acquired companies
* Supporting new business initiatives (new types of coupons or promotions, rewards points, etc.)
* Performance improvements (asynchronous design to take advantage of multiple processor cores, etc.).
* Make changes necessary to safely move away from software that was no longer supported (Win XP, old versions of .NET, etc.)
* Employee retention. Nobody wants to work with libraries/languages/patterns/frameworks that are so out of date that your skills become less valuable. This was never the primary impetus for change, but we definitely took it into account.
Latest Answers