Application Maintenance

2 Feb 2008 by Chetan Shah.

Production Support / Application Maintenance, these words conjure up some ugly pictures in any software developer’s mind. Application maintenance translates into being “on call”, “grunt work” type of activities which no one wants to take up on. Yet, in my opinion this is the most important activities of the entire software life cycle. I equate this to a good customer service experience at a store or getting help on phone when your cable TV is not working you want to get it fixed asap so that one does not miss her favorite TV program. You want it now and you want it fixed the right way.

One of the things which an software organization does as part of production support activities is that is churns out pages and pages of word documents and hands it over to support staff. I think this activity is cumbersome and less efficient. Most of the times I have been in a situation where as part of the software delivery team we have been asked to write documentation and then walk thru the support staff so that they can understand what is going on. So far so good.

Fast forward 6 months (I consider this as eternity in today’s software application developement world). Go back to the same documentation and see how much of that thing matches what currently exists in the actual application. I am sure everyone has been in a situation where they just want to delete that document because it has been worthless if not dangerous.

Better way to do the same kind of knowledge harvesting activity is to utilize highly efficient communication tools like Blogs, Sharepoints, Wiki pages/site and discussion forums. They are much easier to maintain (keep it current), easily accessible across the globe at much better speed than downloading a 20MB file in India. And above all the “search” capability. All you have to do is to punch in the keyword and hit search, the related discussion forum, blog, sharepoint etc. will be listed which will allow you to zero in to the steps to fix the problem at hand much faster. Faster solution to the problem translates into a happy and satisfied customer and also no long “late” nighters for the support staff.

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