Address Support Needs

How often you have worked on a project that didn’t consider support needs? I bet your quality of life as a developer was largely influenced by this factor. A supportable application makes a world of difference. Your reusable assets are no different in this regard. Reusable assets need to be robust against failure, scale up to handle additional volume gracefully, and provides relevant runtime metrics for diagnostics and troubleshooting. Here are some common requirements for support:

Handle errors appropriately– this could mean logging, notification alerts, integration with existing support tools, or even calling a particular person.

Instrument reusable assets– log error information, runtime data parameters, processing/transaction metrics, system variables and provide an interface to access all this stuff

Design for things to handle runtime failure– can you use an alternate path to fulfill a request? Can you store requests and process them after a time window? Even if you cannot do any of these, throw the error and report it. Never swallow exceptions

Report metrics– provide standard metrics reports as well as ability to perform ad-hoc queries.

Integrate errors with issue tracking when applicable– Link known errors happening in production with the relevant issue from the issue tracking system. Make it easy for the support person to know that it is a known issue, possible workarounds, and escalation paths.

Regardless of whether your team or an external group supports your applications, the support requirements need to be addressed. Without addressing supportability your reusable assets won’t be reliable, robust, or dependable.