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

12.1. The Application Maintenance Team

Once the system is in production and the initial post go-live support is completed, the project team hands over the system to the application maintenance team, which takes on the management and maintenance of all the source code and other project artifacts throughout the system's lifetime, including configuration, data, test scripts, builds, and regression. The application maintenance team utilizes development environments, test environments, configuration management, and build and regression environments. The environments, tools, and processes are no different from those used throughout the project.

The application maintenance team, which is typically smaller than the project team, comprises people who have a full understanding of the system's functional and technical aspects. The structure of the application maintenance team depends entirely on the organization. However, the application maintenance team is very similar to the service delivery team, and sometimes the two functions are combined. The team is made up of functional designers, developers, database administrators, build and release personnel, testers, and so on. In some cases, the individuals perform multiple roles to reduce the size of the team and reduce costs. The application maintenance team may also look after multiple systems within the organization. In many cases, resources from the application maintenance team are involved early in the project to ease the handover process ...