Maintenance Organization

Definition

Maintenance Organization

any organization that maintains one or more systems, applications, and/or components and associated work products (e.g., documentation and tests)

Classification

As illustrated in the preceding figure, Maintenance Organization is part of the following inheritance hierarchy:

• Type: Concrete
• Superclass: Organization
• Subclasses:
  • None

Responsibilities

The typical responsibilities of a Maintenance Organization are to:

• Plan maintenance tasks.
• Perform adaptive maintenance to make minor changes to support new requirements.
• Perform corrective maintenance to fix defects that have caused failures.
• Perform perfective maintenance to improve quality.
• Perform preventative maintenance to fix known defects that have not yet caused failures.
• Submit formal change requests for major changes requiring the development of new major variants or versions.

Guidelines

• There can easily be multiple maintenance organizations on a project or program.
• A maintenance organization and other organizations may belong either to the same or to different businesses.
• Like the same person playing multiple roles or being a member of multiple teams, the same business division may be modeled as a maintenance organization as well as a:
  • Customer organization if it funds the development of the applications it maintains.
  • Development organization if it develops the work products it maintains.
  • User organization if it uses the applications it maintains.
  • Operations organization if it operates the applications it maintains.
• The maintenance organization typically uses the OPEN Process Framework (OPF) to construct its maintenance process.
• The maintenance organization typically inherits the common team guidelines from the organization process component.