Sustaining Engineering 101: Navigating the World of Enterprise Software Maintenance

In today's rapidly evolving software landscape, organizations face a critical challenge: maintaining existing software systems while driving innovation. Development teams are caught between delivering new features and supporting legacy systems, leading to fragmented focus, technical debt accumulation, and increased developer burnout. This challenge is amplified in enterprise environments where multiple software versions must be maintained simultaneously, creating a complex web of dependencies, security requirements, and customer-specific needs. The challenge is further compounded by the exponential growth in software complexity, with modern systems incorporating numerous dependencies, third-party integrations, and legacy components. As these systems age, the knowledge gap widens – original developers move on, documentation becomes outdated, and tribal knowledge dissipates.

Software Sustaining Engineering solves this issue by eradicating ad-hoc solutions, inconsistent support quality, and missed opportunities for revenue generation. Additionally, opensource culture can go hand-in-hand with software maintenance as it is one of the critical pillars.

Agenda:

1. The Journey Begins: Understanding the Software Development Lifecycle

- From Concept to Code: How software is born and evolves.

2. Beyond Launch: What Happens After Enterprise Software Hits Production?

- The Critical Phase: Keeping things running smoothly post-launch.

3. The Developer's Dilemma: Tackling Challenges in Continuous Software Maintenance

- Real-life Struggles: Overcoming roadblocks to keep software thriving

- With incoming development , developers find it hard to juggle between maintaining the software & development which in turns piles up the technical debt.

4. Sustaining Software: The Action Plan for Long-term Success

- Ensuring Lifelong Health: Key strategies for ongoing software vitality.

5. How OpenSource Software(OSS) empowers Software Maintenance

- Upstream first ideas help developers contribute to the packages/tools used in their products to fix vulnerabilities and defects in code

6. EUS vs. ELS: What and Why the Distinction Matters for Successful Maintenance

- Balancing User Support and Legacy Systems: Finding the sweet spot.

7. Inside Red Hat: How Sustaining Engineering Drives Innovation and Efficiency

- A Peek into Best Practices: How Red Hat masters ongoing software success.