After understanding the requirements, Maintenance Change Request Manager must analyze the feasibility of executing the
maintenance change request. Review of feasibility must consider the technical, economic, schedule and operational
feasibility. Technical, economic and schedule feasibility check help in understanding the technical impact of the
modification, alternate solutions like prototyping, short term and long-term cost benefits, effectiveness of the process,
etc. Operational feasibility should analyze the inside operations on the functionality of the process, implementation and
how to deal with the change resistance and acceptance.
The next step after feasibility analysis, is to plan for the Maintenance Change Request. Based on the initial analysis, the
Maintenance Change Request Manager must estimate the size and effort required for each activity with the help of right
estimation techniques. Size estimate determines the probable size of a software applications like number of Lines of Code
(LOC) to be modified, number of Function Points (FP) to be changed, etc. Effort estimation helps in predicting the efforts
required to develop or carry out the changes for the maintainance change request. The relationship between the effort and
the size estimates helps the Maintenance Change Request Manager to measure the productivity required to develop and
implement the maintenance change request. In addition to the size and effort estimations, it is sometimes beneficial to do
an estimation based on the complexity of the changes. This includes the volume of changes required, number of applications
impacted due to the modified change, business impact due to the change implementation, number of database tables to be
updated, etc.
Once the estimation is done, the Maintenance Change Request Manager must identify the number of resources required to build
and implement the maintenance change request. Based on the estimation, the Maintenance Change Request Manager must prepare
the release schedule. The technology configuration items to be modified or developed, along with their complexities, are
listed. Resources are allocated to various tasks based on their availability and skill. The maintenance change request can
either be delivered individually or as part of the already scheduled releases, as agreed with the Client. The Maintenance
Change Request Manager must decide on the release plan for the accepted and approved changes and bug fixes at this stage.
If the changes and bug fixes have to be implemented as part of the already scheduled release, the Release Management
process must be followed. Maintenance Change Request Manager must agree with the Release Manager on the target release
date, and commitments on the dates must be received from all relevant stakeholders. Once the commitment on the release
schedule is received, the maintenance change request must be assigned to the respective Delivery Team.
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