Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

12.2. Application Maintenance Functions

The application maintenance team performs similar functions to the design, development, test, and configuration management teams. The application maintenance team will usually provide the following types of services:

• Defect analysis and fix-on-fail — In the previous chapter, we looked at incident investigation and some of the typical incidents that can occur. The application maintenance team is responsible for analyzing issues and providing fixes for the system. This could involve putting workarounds in place as well as root cause analysis and resolution.

• Application enhancements and changes — Throughout the lifetime of the system there will be updates and enhancements that need to be made. In some cases, there are minor issues or enhancements that were not completed during development that are handed over to the application maintenance team providing a small pipeline of work. The scope of the project will be restricted at the start and there may be features that have been deemed low priority that the application maintenance team will implement through minor updates. The operations and service delivery teams are always looking at ways to improve stability and performance of the application, which typically results in enhancements being made to the application by the application maintenance team.

• Release and configuration management — As fixes and enhancements are provided, they need to be packaged into releases and tested appropriately. This ...