Applications & Architecture upgrade and Maintenance

Software and Apps up to date: Count on us

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:

Repetitive development and routine evaluations
Clean code as an imperative
Code refactoring whenever necessary
Proper documentation techniques
Automation of key processes (mostly build generation and testing)
Version control
Code reviews (a.k.a. Peer reviewing)
Pair programming

Success Stories

We have a proven track record in providing sophisticated cybersecurity solutions to clients across many industries.

ViacomCBS

BairesDev’s team of first-class Software Engineers assists in the evolution and maintenance of ViacomCBS’s current web apps.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How much does it cost to update legacy systems?

Given the diverse nature of business software, it’s virtually impossible to provide an estimate on how much it would cost to update any given legacy system (or the range would be so great that it would prove useless). Think about it – it’s not the same to update an internal messaging system, a CRM, or an AI-driven ERP, especially if those systems were custom-built.

Besides, legacy systems tend to use old technologies and/or languages that have fallen out of favor. That means that updating a legacy system might imply rewriting huge chunks of code or practically rewriting the whole system. Generally speaking, the following factors add up to the final cost of an update:

Large systems with significant complexity
Systems highly embedded with other systems in their environment
Large data storage (that implies massive migration)
Technologies and languages used in its development
Level of customization

The more of those factors you have in your legacy system, the more it can cost to update it. Still, it’s better to evaluate each specific case to get a proper estimate, which is why we encourage you to talk to the BairesDev team for a better assessment.

What’s the difference between update and upgrade?

Though a lot of people use the terms “update” and “upgrade” interchangeably, they imply 2 different processes. On one hand, “update” refers to the changes the development team applies to a system but without modifying the core structure. Updates usually are all about fixing bugs, patching security vulnerabilities, and adding support for new hardware, among other things.

An upgrade, on the other hand, is a set of significant changes that affect the system’s functionality on a more comprehensive level. You can have minor upgrades (where there are new features that add up to the existing functionality) and major upgrades (that completely reimagine the software, even to the point of replacing core functionality with other features).

The main difference between them, then, is how deep the changes brought by an update and an upgrade really are. An update is more “superficial” while an upgrade is more complex and “deeper.” Due to that, another difference between both is that updates are far more frequent, as they bring necessary tweaks and adjustments that are easier to apply. Upgrades, for their part, are less common but provide many modifications and improvements at once.

What might happen if you don’t upgrade your software?

You might be tempted to keep your software as is because you can’t face the costs of upgrading or because you feel like the system is working just fine. However, working with old systems can bring a host of problems, including:

Increased instability
Low performance
Decreased security and increased vulnerability
Integration issues with newer software
Inability to leverage new technologies
Difficulty in getting proper support due to lack of talent (especially when the legacy system was written in an outdated language or technology)

What is a major software upgrade?

A major software upgrade refers to a significant change to the software that adds new important features or modifies the application substantially. An example of a major software upgrade happens whenever an operating system vendor (i.e. Microsoft) releases a new major version of their platform (i.e. when Microsoft released Windows 10, everyone that had Windows 8 had to go through a major software upgrade to get the new system).

A major upgrade is different from a minor upgrade in that it significantly changes the software. A minor upgrade only adds new functionality that, while making the software more productive, doesn’t fundamentally change it.

What does software architecture mean?

The software architecture can be defined in different ways. First and foremost, it’s the set of principles, guidelines, policies, models, standards, and processes that guide the selection and implementation of different solutions aligned with specific business goals.

Software architecture is also the underlying structure of a system, covering all its components, their properties, and the relationships between them.

Finally, software architecture can also be seen as a description of the components in a system and the intended interaction between them.

What are the different types of software architecture?

Given that the software architecture and its related design principles, decisions, and outcomes directly impact a software’s capabilities to meet business, operational, and technical goals, it’s important to pick the right one. Since objectives vary depending on the project, there are different architectural patterns for development teams to use. The most common ones include:

Layered pattern. Used to structure software that can be decomposed into groups of subtasks or layers. Each layer relates to each other and provides services to those at higher levels. Mostly used in desktop and ecommerce applications.
Client-server pattern. Architecture with a server and multiple clients, where the former provides services to the latter. Used in online apps for sharing, banking, and email.
Master-slave pattern. Here, a master component distributes the work among its slaves and only computes results from what it gathers from them. Used mainly in databases.
Peer-to-peer pattern. Made up of individual components known as peers that function both as clients and servers in an interconnected network of peers. Used in file sharing, blockchain, and certain multimedia protocols.
Event-bus pattern. Composed of 4 components (event source, event listener, channel, and event bus) where listeners subscribe to a channel to receive particular messages through an event bus. Used in Android development and notifications.
Model-view-controller (MVC) pattern. Consists of 3 parts. The model contains the functionality and data of the app. The view displays the information. The controller manages the input. It works like that to decouple components and allow for efficient code reuse. It’s a standard when designing GUIs and web apps.