The following outlines the benefits of maintenance and support for your product and the services we offer at CodeLink.

Why do you need to maintain and support your application?

Technology is continuously innovating, which makes it crucial to ensure your product stays up to date. Maintenance and support services ensure you can maintain business continuity, your software is updated, user issues are actioned, and your platform is fully functional.

As new versions of the libraries and frameworks used to build your product are released it is important that the team keep your product in line with updates made. Even the most well-written applications need to be maintained, whether that requires upgrading to the latest version of the framework used, or responding to changes in external services.

It is also important that you stay compliant and keep up to date on changes made to application regulations, policies, and practices.

What is the difference between maintenance and support?

Support

Support is reactive updates that need to be made to the application. Support is required when issues are reported by internal staff, your team, or your customers. Issues may be small and can be fixed during standard development sprints, or they may be critical and need immediate action.

Maintenance

Maintenance is the proactive ongoing application support required to ensure that your product has continued full functionality. Application maintenance is the continuous updating, analyzing, modifying, and re-evaluating of your existing software applications. The ongoing task of maintenance ensures that your application is always running with full functionality. Our team proactively addresses any updates as they are required when changes are made to the frameworks, libraries, and external services used.

Support

We offer a range of support options to suit the needs of your business. For each support package team members will be alerted by system monitoring tracking if any critical or high-level issues occur. Team members can also be contacted directly during their registered hours for each package.

24/7 - On-call

24/7 on-call support is the highest level of support offered to ensure that your application has around-the-clock attention from our support team.

24/5 - On-call

24/5 on-call support covers around-the-clock attention from our support team during the workweek.

Business Hours

Business Hours support covers all standard business hours during the workweek.

How is the priority of support issues defined?

1. Critical - Service is unavailable to all users using the service
2. High - Service degraded for all users or unavailable for a major group of users
3. Medium - A small section or group of users affected
4. Low - One user is affected

Maintenance

Maintenance can be done both during the standard development cycles or for set windows of maintenance support for projects that are post-development and in maintenance mode. We recommend setting a time every quarter to dedicate to system maintenance where the team will focus on upgrading any systems that require effort to stay up to date.

Maintenance Steps:

1. Maintenance Analysis: During both development and post-development, the team tracks all of the frameworks, libraries, and external services used throughout the different products and services we have built. As new updates are made the team assesses how the changes will impact the features built which leverage these services. For some updates, there are no changes that require an immediate update, though for other updates the team needs to prioritize the upgrade to ensure all functionality maintains. It is important to try to stay as up-to-date as possible to minimize the overall effort in doing an upgrade.
2. Upgrade Overview: Once the team assesses that an upgrade is required they will present you with an overview of the effort required, the impacts of the new upgrade, and how we should prioritize the upgrade effort.
3. Implementation: Our team works on all of the required implementation work to upgrade the required functionality.
4. Testing: We leverage a range of industry-standard testing practices to test all of the impacted functionality and the overall application to ensure that the upgrade is fully functional. Once we verify that all features and functions are stable and operating as intended in our test environment, we then deploy the update to live production.