Project Support and Maintenance
Learn the basics of project maintenance and support.
Overview
This lesson will review best practices for project maintenance and support. We'll study some modifications and changes required to achieve the project’s long-term sustainability.
Supporting a project
The team that builds a product should have a stake in supporting that product. This can be first line support in a small organization or even third line support in a larger one. This keeps the team focused on reliable code that can be monitored. Making a system easy to support may involve adding additional endpoints to allow a system to be tested. For example, if events only happen at certain times of the day, it can be hard to test a change without a long wait.
It should be the team’s job to keep the runbooks up-to-date. Runbooks are manuals that explain how to operate the product. Usually, these are only referenced if something has gone wrong. Runbooks usually consist of diagnostic checks and restoration processes. The other side of the contract is that the team has the right to fix anything that caused a support incident outside of business hours. If we're expected to support something, we ...