Many years ago, I was astonished that development team and support team were separated in large organisations. Coming from smaller organisation, I often need to handle support after development and relate the pain points of support. In some cases, I add the support requirements to my development efforts to factor the changes encountered during support. Time have shown that DevOps are better in many aspects compared to traditional AMS (Application Managed Support).
It is the support team issue!
- Project duration is often short and development team usually code against known requirements and test cases.
- For future risk and issues, development team tends to transition this to support team.
- Support issues that require change is considered enhancement.
- Data or user education are support team issues.
Enhancement is development scope
- Support team are measured by support ticket and SLA (Service Level Agreement).
- Known issues are easily fixed and can meet meet SLA.
- RCA (Root Cause Analysis) are only done upon requested and there is no incentive to resolve root cause for support team.
- Resolution of root cause falls under enhancement and belongs to development scope.
There is now a demand for DevOps as many organisations switch to Agile. The disconnect between development and support can now be resolved. However, this will comes at a steep cost as DevOps is more than development and support.
Danny Kwok 