Project Support

After the project was finished, tested out and launched, then the most important phase begins. This is the production and support stage. The time how long the system can work without the support is very depend on the development quality. In any case you will need the technician who will serve your needs of keeping the system up and running, adding a new features and fixing the bugs. No one can do it better than the guy who invented and implemented all that system. Of course you can hire another consultant in the case when it is impossible to keep the original author in a team. The problems of understanding of the someone's else programming code were discussed in "Off-the-shelf Programs - Pros and Cons" section.

Therefore when you hire someone keep in mind that your relations will not finish after you confirm that work is done. You should discuss all the details of your further cooperation (including payment) even before he starts. After the few months of production you will know the amount of support-related work and will be able to figure out appropriate charges amount.

At least the few first weeks after project launch you will discover various bugs that were not fixed during the testing. It is quite possible because the information that real users input into the system and actions that they do are very different from those that were used to test out the program. The actions that users perform sometimes are such a strange that developer even can't tell that it is possible ! That's why you should keep your developer close after the project launch.

Typical kind of support work:

• Backups automation
• Restore after crashes
• Adding the new functions to the system
• Bug fixing
• Troubleshooting and customers support (answer the questions etc.)

The first item of this list should be included in the specifications. I guess the importance of backups is quite clear. If the data that was collected by Enterprise during its work will be lost, the results are vary from loss of leading role (caused by the recover time delay) to running out off business.