Section 10.6. Checklist

10.6. Checklist

This section contains a short list of questions to ask yourself about how your own development environment is maintained and also how your project's products are maintained:

• Who is responsible for deciding when tools or operating systems need to be upgraded or replaced?

• Who makes sure that new licenses are acquired for tools before the existing licenses expire or are exceeded?

• How much of your development environment can be controlled using your SCM tool? Can your SCM tool track changes to itself?

• How long does each release of your product last? How long is it supported by your project or company, and how long is it actually used by customers?

• Which areas of your product are the hardest ones to work on? Why? What could make them easier to maintain?

• Which parts of your product would you most like to refactor or rewrite? How do you know whether the time spent refactoring or rewriting them would actually make them easier for anyone else to maintain?

• What finite resources are used by your development environment? How long could you use your environment if nothing were ever discarded?

• Do you know who is permitted to make changes in product releases that are in maintenance mode?

• How confident are you that your unit and system tests let you know if your maintenance changes have broken something unexpectedly?

• How do you decide what to test in a maintenance release of your product?

• How do you know who to contact about each part of the product in earlier releases?

• Do you have processes defined for removing files, SCM tags, builds, test definitions and results, bug tracking information, and releases from your project?