Apps & Architecture Upgrade and Maintenance

Digitizing your entire business workflow is just the first step to stay ahead of the competition. If you truly want to leverage the new technologies and prevent any issues, you have to keep your whole IT infrastructure updated and well-maintained. That’s precisely what BairesDev can provide you. With our applications and architecture upgrade and maintenance services, you can be sure that your digital platforms and tools will be as efficient and high-performing as possible.

Our Methodology and Expertise

Our engineering teams have the skills and know-how to tackle any upgrade and maintenance project you might have in your hands. That’s because our software engineers have vast experience working with:

Software update and maintenance
Web and mobile apps update and maintenance
Application reengineering
Code refactoring
Multi-tiered support solutions

To tackle all those kinds of projects we use a Design Thinking mindset that puts the applications’ end user in the spotlight. Thus, we use the users’ issues and needs as our starting point to understand which parts of your tech infrastructure need improvement and work with the users’ feedback to upgrade your platforms while supporting your operations.

Stages of Software and App Upgrade

Our comprehensive app upgrade process goes through several stages to ensure that the resulting product is more efficient, secure, solid, and scalable than your previous software.

Digital environment assessment

In this first stage, we meet with you to understand your needs, which can cover anything from low-performing platforms to obsolete tools and technologies. We take a look at the problems you’re facing and start sketching the potential solutions, based on your requirements and needs.
Upgrade plan and design

After thoroughly understanding where you are and where you want to go, we sit down to come up with a strategy to tackle your project. We define the project’s scope, pick a methodology, choose a tech stack, and create an upgrade schedule with its metrics.
Upgrade development

We start working on the updates, a stage that will largely depend on your requirements and goals. Here, our engineering team works on your existing code to improve it, develop new features and tools to boost your existing software, or completely reimagines your applications for maximum performance.
QA & testing

Before going to the deployment stage, we make sure that the software we worked on performs as intended and has the fewest bugs possible. This stage can be a separate instance or a continuous effort, depending on the methodology we choose for your project.
Deployment stage

After backing up your system, we apply our upgrades to production and modernize your infrastructure. When the first deployment is complete, our teams run trial runs to make sure that the updates have been applied correctly.
Support stage

Even when we are sure that everything is working fine, we still monitor your infrastructure and help you with any issue that might arise. Thus, we make sure that users don’t suffer any problems and that the transition to the new systems is seamless.

Types of Software or App Upgrade

Depending on what you focus on, you can find different types of software upgrades. One of the most common ways to classify app upgrades is by understanding the upgrade’s impact. Thus, we can work on:

Technical upgrade – when we introduce changes to the software to improve the performance of an existing feature or to take advantage of new hardware capabilities.
Functional upgrade – when we add completely new features that weren’t present in the solution.
Transformational upgrade – when we mix technical and functional upgrades while adding more complexity and features to a solution.

Another way to classify upgrades is based on when and how we apply the new versions of the software.

Rolling upgrade – when we apply the changes with minimal disruptions to your infrastructure (that is, only by stopping a handful of core services while all of the others keep going).
Non-rolling upgrade – when we stop your infrastructure to apply the changes, a process usually reserved for transformational upgrades.

Finally, it’s worth noting that we also classify the types of software upgrades according to the work we carry out in the code.

Code refactoring – when we improve internal code structures to enhance performance without affecting the existing functionalities.
Application reengineering – when we reimagine and redesign legacy systems to improve them across the board, including using a new architecture to guarantee the solution’s scalability.

Software or App Upgrade Design

At BairesDev, we design a software upgrade depending on a number of factors, including current needs, business goals, existing infrastructure, technical aspects, upgrade scope, and convenience. All of those aspects come into play at the design stage, when we start planning the upgrade for your solutions.

The design itself will depend on the ultimate goal of your upgrade. There are several reasons why you would upgrade your software, including:

Fixing critical bugs and improving overall security
Adding new features
Expanding capabilities
Improving performance
Implementing new technologies
Changing the inner logic

Depending on your goals, the upgrade will require different approaches. Fixing critical bugs might only take some adjustments in the code, adding new features might call for a whole new development from scratch while expanding capabilities (especially if you’re looking to scale) will surely imply upgrading the architecture. Since there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for upgrade design, we have a custom-made process that helps our engineers understand your objectives to provide the proper solution.

Why it’s Important to Design Maintainable Systems

One of the primary goals of BairesDev’s engineering teams when developing solutions is to come up with maintainable systems. In other words, we focus on building applications that we can later modify, scale, and expand with ease. To do so, we use the best development practices, follow strict documentation guidelines, and employ QA-tested processes that ensure quality results.

That same approach makes all of our software easily maintainable and upgradeable. How? Because an application with clean code, properly documented, and with solid foundations has far fewer issues than applications that don’t have all those things. That’s why we insist on designing maintainable systems – and why we extend that focus to all of our upgrade development projects as well.

Reasons for designing maintainable systems

Maintainable systems are easier to scale, modify, and expand
Any experienced engineer can change a maintainable system (i.e., you don’t need the original team to do so)
Costs of developing and supporting a maintainable system are lower
Maintainable systems tend to be more stable (i.e. new changes doesn’t cause major disruptions)
Integrating a maintainable system with other tools is more straightforward

Our Practices for Maintainable System Design

At BairesDev, we know that keeping software maintainable isn’t an easy feat, especially if it wasn’t like that from the beginning. That’s why we use the following practices to ensure that your upgraded software is more maintainable: