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
There is ‘theory’ and there is ‘practicality’. In theory, you can write software once and assuming it works, you never ever need to change it.
in practice, people need to make changes to the software all the times. Security vulnerabilities. Bug fixes. New business functionality. Platform updates (Android makes an update, so you have to make an update on your application)…
The other aspect is there is a cost to ‘train’ someone on the software. So it is very very very challenging to not maintain the software and then when a change needs to be done, just bring in some contractors and have them make the change. They don’t know anything about it and so it’s going to be very bug-prone and time consuming for them to actually make those changes.
It ‘generally’ makes more sense for any software in use to have some people ‘maintain’ it.
Latest Answers