Software Maintenance

What is Energy.intersect.org.au Software Maintenance?

Software Maintenance is an optional service available for software built or implemented by Intersect Australia (and other software by special agreement). It enables you to be confident of proactively maintaining a secure and supported level of underlying technology, as well as be assured of software fixes as they are needed.

An Energy.intersect.org.au Software Maintenance agreement means that if your system develops a problem we can get to work fixing the issue much faster. You don’t have to wait for analysis and estimations because engineering time to fix problems is included in advance. It also means that our engineers are more familiar with your system and code as we pre-allocate time to check and maintain supporting technology, so there is less “getting to know you” time at the beginning of each fix or other engagement.

“Maintenance” means that up to twice a year our engineers will review your system, and recommend updates to technology components to retain currency.  System libraries and engines like Apache Tomcat or Ruby on Rails have modules that are regularly updated; under your maintenance agreement these can have minor version upgrades applied so that your system maintains currency and security. Our engineers will also support you for minor operating system upgrades.

Who is Software Maintenance for?

Software Maintenance agreements are targeted at members and other customers that engage Intersect for application development and/or implementation. In special circumstances we can also provide support and maintenance for other applications.

What about applications not written by Intersect?

Energy.intersect.org.au Software Maintenance can also be provided for Open Source and non-Intersect developed applications that we have implemented for you. In these cases, support will be limited to negotiating fixes with the software creators and implementing them.

What charges are involved?

Pricing varies according to the complexity and nature of the target system. Please get in touch and we’ll work through your needs together.

What is Included?

  • Fixing any code written by us that is not functioning as described in the system documentation. (Bug fixing)
  • Twice in a year we will review your application and the environment around it. This review will include a recommendation of components to upgrade. We will then work with you to select  a suitable time to upgrade these components. We will implement and/or manage application continuity over minor versions.
  • We will restore functionality across minor version upgrades of the underlying operating system and components. If your application runs within OwnTime Hosting we will also install minor updates for your operating system, in order to maintain security and currency.
  • Custom inclusions can be negotiated on a specific project basis.

What is excluded?

  • Updates and enhancements to features and functions.
  • Upgrades to operating system and components across major versions.
  • Fixes to code not managed by us. We will work with the code managers to facilitate fixes where possible, and install these fixes, however we cannot warranty that we will be able to implement fixes on code we do not manage.

Support and Service Levels

Ongoing Support

Standard business support hours are 9am-5pm Monday to Friday, except public holidays.

First level initial point of contact end user support is provided by the customer’s organisation, with escalation to Intersect after screening.

Raising an Issue

Incidents are reported by logging a ticket at help.intersect.org.au or by sending an email to help@intersect.org.au. Issue reports ideally include:

Sample steps to reproduce Sample helpful contextual information
  • Environment used (production, staging, test)
  • Expected vs actual behaviour of the system
  • Date/time of the occurrence
    (to help with log analysis)
  • OS and browser details
  • Username and role
  • Data being worked with at the time of error
  • Screenshots
  • URL of the problem area

Resolving an Issue

Our helpful Operations team will provide an initial response that usually involves contacting you to initiate triage. Typically further responses will be sent to establish:

  • Confirmation that the problem is understood and reproducible.
  • If the solution is known and straightforward, a plan as to how the problem can be fixed, including what needs to be done to deploy locally.
  • If the solution is not immediately obvious, an estimate of time needed to investigate.

Our teams will next diligently work the problem, providing regular updates via Help.intersect.org.au. Support and resolution of production issues take priority over ongoing project work. The size, scope and time to resolve software issues is varies and we will leave no stone unturned to progress as fast as possible, subject to upstream supplier and other technical dependencies.

Service targets

These targets represent maximums; we aim to exceed these where possible.

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Incident First Response
Security Containment Objective

Software Currency Objective

1 business day
2 business days
6 months
The maximum amount of elapsed time from when a ticket is raised to first contact
The maximum amount of time elapsed after diagnosing a security problem until initial mitigation.
The maximum amount of time elapsed between configuration management reviews.
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