The Training of Software Developers on Maintenance Activities for Database Applications

During the exploitation of database software applications may occur problems with origins in the development stage and problems due to the evolution of resources that are interacting with the application (software, hardware and human resources). The initial construction of the application is made with a predetermined resources system, but during the exploitation some of the resources are changing (the OS, the DBMS, the communication with other software resources etc). The intervention on a running database application makes some problems which do not appear in the development stage. The occurred risks in the intervention moment on a running database application are higher than the ones from the first use of the application and it needs more attention in this stage of the maintenance training of software developers. There are also cases where the database system architecture has undergone multiple changes or its architecture is no longer known. In this case it is necessary to identify the existing architecture in order to transform the architecture according to the new requirements appeared in the maintenance stage. This paper aims to summarize some of these problems that are occurring in the maintenance stage of the relational database applications and it proposes some guidelines to resolve them during the training process for software developers..