As Agile approaches are gaining acceptance in software development organization, this article discusses how Agile could impact the support and maintenance processes of existing mature products.
It explores some specific support or maintenance issues like the volatility of support. Support and maintenance teams could have a “burning” issues backlog which makes it challenging for sprint planning and sticking to the plan. There is also the fact that most customer support services have SLAs (service level agreements) that define a TAT (turnaround time) for response and resolution. Even with these challenges, the author lists some benefits of adopting an agile approach to support and maintenance.