Operation and Support

Operation and support will detail how people will run, monitor and manage your software in a production environment.

ℹ️

Production is a widely used term whose meaning varies. In this context we regard a production environment as any environment in which valuable work is performed. This usually implies a controlled environment that can be altered only through a change control process, rather that directly by developers. Consider what would happen if you accidentally remove a database content; if this is considered a disaster, you are probably working in a production environment.

Questions that will be answered within this section are:

• Is it clear how the system provides the ability for operators to monitor and manage the system.

• How can operators start to diagnose problems.

• Where are errors and information logged?

• Do configuration changes require a restart?

• Are there any manual housekeeping tasks that need to be performed on a regular basis?

• Does old data need to be periodically archived?

Audience

The audience for this section is predominantly the technical people in the software development team along with others that may help deploy, support and operate the software system.

Structure

This section is usually fairly narrative in nature, with a heading for each related set of information (e.g. monitoring, diagnostics, configuration, etc).