Waterfall SDLC Documentation for a University Course Registration & Scheduling Web Portal

10. Maintenance Phase: Operations, Support, Monitoring, Backup, and Changes

Operational Ownership

After production acceptance, the portal enters Maintenance. University IT owns technical operations while Registrar Operations owns registration rules and business-process decisions.

Monitoring

• Application availability and health endpoints.
• API latency and error rate.
• Authentication failures.
• Registration success and failure rates.
• Database connectivity and resource utilization.
• Unexpected authorization failures or suspicious privileged actions.
• Infrastructure capacity during registration peaks.

Support Priorities

• P1 Critical: widespread outage, incorrect enrollment state, security incident, or data corruption. Immediate escalation.
• P2 High: major registration function unavailable to a significant user group. Urgent response.
• P3 Medium: limited functional defect with workaround.
• P4 Low: cosmetic issue, minor enhancement, or documentation correction.

Backup and Recovery

• Backups follow the university's approved production database policy.
• Recovery procedures identify restore responsibilities and validation steps.
• Restore capability is tested periodically in a non-production environment.
• Critical registration-period changes receive heightened monitoring and operational review.

Maintenance Categories

• Corrective: defect and incident fixes.
• Adaptive: updates required by infrastructure, browser, identity, or institutional platform changes.
• Perfective: approved usability, performance, and workflow improvements.
• Preventive: dependency updates, refactoring, monitoring improvements, and security hardening.

Post-Release Change Workflow

1. Record the issue or enhancement.
2. Classify operational priority.
3. Evaluate requirement and design impact.
4. Approve through the applicable maintenance change process.
5. Implement and review the change.
6. Test affected and regression scenarios.
7. Deploy through the controlled release procedure.
8. Update documentation and traceability records.

Registration-Period Operations

During major registration windows, the support team uses heightened monitoring, defined escalation contacts, limited-risk production changes, and rapid coordination with Registrar Operations. Non-essential releases should be avoided during the highest-risk enrollment periods.