• Name: Maintenance Rotation

• Owner: Launchpad Project Lead

• Effective: 2011-02-14

• Review: 2011-03-14

Process Overview

At any given time, 2 of the 5 Launchpad/squads are assigned to maintenance work. They handle all the interrupt-driven work. This includes:

• handling critical production incidents

• general bug fixing
• bug triage
• handling of user-generated requests like translation, bug or code imports, user help requests, etc.

The responsibility for these last two bullets rotates between the maintenance squad every week.

Rationale

We want to shield squads working on development projects as much as possible from interrupt as possible. Ideally, we want also to shield developers in maintenance squads working on bug fixing from those, but we are willing to tolerate higher level of interrupts there, because the time to fix a bug is usually much less than to complete a development project.

Rotating the user-generated interrupts between the two maintenance squad, will give one week with lower interrupts to each squad.

Activities

Incidents handling

• Both squads on maintenance are responsible for responding to incidents as they arise.

Maintenance Rotation Schedule

• Each week, one squad is primarily responsible for user support and other operational tasks. The squad exchange the responsibility every week.

• We should have somebody assigned for each of the user-support and operational tasks listed on the MaintenanceRotationSchedule.

• Squads are free to assign the responsibilities in any way they deem fair, but there must be a name assigned to each responsibility for every day of the week.

  • Be mindful of leave.

• When a squad rotates out of a project into maintenance, it will take the maintenance week of the squad with whom they rotate.

General bug fixing

• Self-driven general bug fixing is the standard of the maintenance team (when not handling incidents or another user-generated interrupt).
• Bugs should generally be fixed according to their importance, but discretionary judgment is encouraged.

  • You should be wary of taking on work that will take more than a few days to complete.

Supporting Documentation

• BugTriage

• What is a critical incident?

• Crisis handling policy

• MaintenanceRotationSchedule