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.