My team maintains a suite of applications that are used by over 600 users. With this many users, there are bound to be many trouble tickets submitted. We are normally pretty good at resolving these problems, since maintaining this software is why we get paid. Our customer loses money every time our software does not work correctly. So you can imagine the urgency to fixing bugs quickly. Currently we have conference calls twice a week with the customer to review each and every bug.
Back in the old days, when we had foolishly released buggy software into production, we had many open trouble tickets at a time. That put pressure on the group in our customer organization that oversaw our maintenance. Unfortunately that meant the pressure was applied to our team even more. Every day I would have to spend a good deal of time in my customer's office getting grilled on the progress of every trouble ticket. To this day I regret that upper management in my company did not protect me from such torture. But I digress.
Our customer currently drives the review of the open trouble tickets twice a week. We do not meet physically. However everybody dials in to an AT&T teleconference. I think that many people are actually on the line when we hold these conferences. But mostly the host of this call controls the conference. There is usually one main representative from the users of our software. And there are leads from all the development teams associated with the system. Since we are on top of most of the current problems, these conference calls have been going quite smoothly lately. So well in fact, that I am planning on taking a nice vacation soon. See you later.
