Maintenance-Free Mindset

Let us start with subjects relevant to mindset and cultural shift. I believe that forming the right attitude and mentality is half of the work, and the rest comes with concrete techniques that I will cover later.

Organization’s approach to maintenance

I have seen three different approaches to application maintenance and support activities across various organizations and teams:

1. Most companies have dedicated production support teams responsible for maintaining applications, resolving urgent technical incidents, and delegating troubleshooting to engineering teams only if previous attempts are not successful.
2. Some organizations reluctantly delegate maintenance responsibilities to engineering teams, primarily because they are small or operate under thin margins when a dedicated team is a luxury that they can not afford to have.
3. Only a handful of organizations consciously decline to assemble production support teams as they keep engineering groups accountable for the development and maintenance of their applications.

The first approach above has an unnecessary overhead, assuming that the ...