System maintenance

We maintain many systems for owners across the whole university. These include systems of our own development, purchased systems, inherited systems and external systems. These vary widely in type, size, function and usage. Our experience therefore is also wide. Beyond offering maintenance services for such systems we maintain many of the integrations between them too.

By choosing the Software Development and Maintenance unit for your system maintenance, you’re placing the system in the hands of an organisation where the system engineers work in an environment of like-minded professionals. An environment where experiences, common problems and solutions are shared for the benefit and upkeep of all systems. We aim to minimise personal dependency among our engineers by higher staffing for systems that require it, through knowledge transfer and with good documentation.

Maintenance time for many systems don’t necessitate a full time employee. It can therefore be an advantage for system owners across SLU to pool their system to our unit for maintenance as opposed to specifically recruiting a person to work with the system.

System maintenance is normally organised with a forward looking time frame. Regular meetings, task lists, contact details and decision making pyramids are established. Currently, some system owners have chosen to consolidate several of their systems to a common maintenance object, which has an appointed maintenance leader, plan, budget and resources.

System maintenance can involve short and long term actions, some examples of which are shown below.

Short term maintenance

Typical tasks that may be part of a daily or regular system maintenance:

• Error correction, bug fixes and smaller adjustments.
• User access and authorisation management.
• Data management.
• System monitoring and tests in connection with hosting environment updates.
• Involving the drift unit of the IT-department, and responsibility for non-functional requirements such as hardware specifications, performance etc.
• Informing system owners and users of ongoing service disruptions.
• Communicating ongoing service disruptions with other dependent systems’ system engineers.

Long term maintenance

Typical tasks that may be part of a longer term system maintenance:

• Creation and upkeep of good system documentation.
• Monitoring the current and ever changing technical environment. Life cycle management to promote longer system life or to reduce costs for hosting and maintenance.
• Handling dependencies to other systems.
• Requirement management. Handling new or changed business requirements from the client, so these can be realised with new development projects for the system at hand.
• Version control of code, configurations and executable components of the system.
• Establishment and upkeep of relevant development, test and production environments for the system.