The maintenance activity typically contains the largest portion of an application's lifecycle.  It includes the entire tracking and support infrastructure and may drive additional iterations of construction, test and release.

Maintenance includes the execution of a support plan to ensure the application delivers in production as promised.  Most applications will receive feedback from application users through bug reports, feature requests or help desk tickets.  Maintenance may include application and server monitoring to verify service-level agreements.  The maintenance activity of an application's lifecycle is generally only a portion of a larger operations support process.

Sub Activities

Although most organizations will have some variants, maintenance activities typically include the following:

• Monitoring of application health during production use.
• Tracking of feedback from all varieties of application users.
• Investigation and mitigation of production defects.
• Implementation of additional features.