Maintenance

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Maintenance is the manifestation of the organization's commitment to the customer. Typical maintenance activities include providing fixes for reported errors and providing fix packs or incremental maintenance releases to deploy accumulated error fixes to the install base.

The maintenance activity involves fixing bugs and errors as they are reported by the customer.

Maintenance activites will depend upon the contractual agreement between the developing organization and the customer organization. On some projects, there will be no maintenance activities because the customer did not want to pay for them. Some customers have the resources to perform their own software system maintenance. For those types of customers, it may make more business sense to purchase the product as well as all of the source code instead of paying for maintenance.

Other customer organizations may be far less technically savvy and will want to pay for scheduled maintenance. In those situations, it will be necessary to setup a problem reporting system that the customer can log onto remotely and submit problem reports to the developing organization. This kind of mechanism is often a web-based thin client that is backed by a database management system. Hopefully, if this software development process is followed and given due diligance, the software will not require much maintenance.

At this point, the software development process defined by this web site is now concluded. The developing organization should have an compendium of all of the artifacts developed during the entire software development lifecycle.

Click here to view the project artifact document for the microwave oven example.





No part of this work should be produced or used without the permission of the authors: Michael Turner and Dr. Sharon A White.