Production support is the practices and disciplines of supporting the IT systems/applications which are currently being used by the end users. A production support person/team is responsible for receiving incidents and requests from end-users, analyzing these and either responding to the end user with a solution or escalating it to the other IT teams. These teams may include developers, system engineers and database administrators.
The importance of production support
- In order to understand the importance of production support, one needs to take a few factors into account.
- Studies have found that the maintenance cost of software is more than 90% of the total cost.
- We also know that software spends much more time in production than development because it needs to verify the properties.
- The maintenance cost of the hardware.
- From the factors listed above, one can see that the way in which production support is managed is extremely crucial.