Maintenance Project -Life Cycle

[A Kumar]

Hi,

Can you tell me whats the life cycle of a maintenance project...

Regards

[Ilja Preuss]

It's not that much different from a greenfield project. In fact, if done in an iterative way, every greenfield project basically becomes a maintenance project after the first iteration.

Why do you ask?

Moving to our Process forum...

[A Kumar]

I have had a question about the various phases involved in a maintenance project So i posted....

Can you summarize the phases...in order..

Thanks in advance
Regards
[ July 26, 2006: Message edited by: A Kumar ]

[Ilja Preuss]

It would be much easier to help you if you provided more context:

- what do you already know about maintenance projects,
- what other resources have you already tried (google?) and how did they not provide what you needed,
- what will you do with the knowledge once you have it?

[A Kumar]

Hi,

I havent worked previously on a maintenance project...probably the next one would be that

Did Googling..and searched the Wiki..There was useful info...

But thought that you guys can also give me some info..

I believe that the latter part of the SDLC remains the same whether for the a Development or a maintenance project..

but how about the intial...part where you may have analyse for the issues

Regards

[Stan James]

The agile "planning game" would be a good exercise. Take a day or two in a big room with all the important players, list all the maintenance stories you can think of on index cards, get the the people who use the app and/or the people who pay for it to put the cards in order from most important to least. (I hate "high, medium, low, urgent, cosmetic" and all the other priority ratings. Just put them in order, 1..n.) Estimate each one the best you can, see how long they would all take.

That gives you a pretty good idea of what you should be working on and how long it might take.

BTW: You might introduce some tasks that the customer doesn't care about at all. Clean up the code repository, upgrade to a new release of UDB, whatever. A couple times over the years we have told our customer that for every $100 you give us, we will work $90 on your stories, but we have to work $10 on some under-the-covers technical stuff.

[Scott Ambler]

If you're interested in a full SDLC, you might find the Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) to be revealing. As you can see, I add a Production and Retirement phase to the RUP lifecycle, as well as a few new disciplines. I think that a common mistake that people make is to talk about a "maintenance phase". What really happens, if you step back from the traditional mindset a bit, is that a system goes into production. While it is in production potential defects and new requirements are identified for it. Those potential changes are either addressed immediately as a "hot fix" or fed back into the development cycle for a future release of the system. In short, change management occurs during the production phase.

- Scott