Skip to content

    Policy for backporting fixes

    Merative ™ Social Program Management is now Cúram ™ by Merative™

    Merative ™ Social Program Management Policy for backporting fixes

    Question & Answer

    Question

    What is the policy for backporting fixes in Merative Social Program Management ?

    Answer

    Definition of a backport:

    A fix which has been released and delivered that is now being requested on an earlier version of the product.

    Supporting information required:

    Before a backport could be considered the following information should be provided to Merative Support:

    • Business justification for why it is considered a critical business impact
    • Why an immediate solution is required
    • Information regarding why the customer has not been in a position to take on an upgrade that would have included the fix
    • Exact version of Merative Social Program Management this is being requested on
    • Is this a production issue?
    • Is this considered to be a regression issue?
    • Does the project have a workaround for the issue? If so, details of the workaround should be provided
    • Project timelines
      • Development phase complete date
      • User Acceptance Testing start and complete dates
      • System Testing start and complete dates
      • Production Roll-out date

    Criteria to be met:

    • No viable work around is available
    • Critical business impact
    • Must be a Severity 1 or Severity 2 issue (Severity 3 or Severity 4 issues do not constitute a critical business impact)
    • Immediate solution required
    • The official fix has only been available for a short period of time and the customer has had insufficient time to upgrade to that version of the product
    Note: Meeting the criteria above does not mean a critical fix will be provided. It means that a critical fix request can be raised. The request will then be reviewed and assessed.

    Declined Backport:

    If the above Criteria are not met, the expectation should be that your backport request will be declined and you will receive a support case update similar to that below:

    “A fix will not be provided as it does not meet the criteria per the Merative Social Program Management Policy for Backporting Fixes. It is not considered a critical business impact because it is a low priority fix that was provided <X months> ago giving the project more than adequate time to apply it into production.”

    Accepted Backport:

    If the above Criteria are met, then we will require the customer to agree to the following:

    The fix can be provided on the customer's version <X> provided that the project provide an update on the support case containing the following information:

    • Commitment as to when they will move to the latest refresh pack, fix pack and/or ifix release on their modification version or to the next available modification (or higher) release
    • Acceptance that a fully supported fix was pro-actively released by Merative <X> months ago
    • Acceptance that fixes replicated to prior versions in a test fix undergo limited testing. The project accepts the risk of putting it into production and to mitigate this should move to a fully supported version of Merative Social Program Management at the earliest opportunity
    • Acceptance that Merative recommends the installation of Preventive Service Packages to pro-actively avoid impacting problems caused by software defects already known and corrected by Merative
    • Acceptance that requesting the back porting of fixes which have already been released is not provided for by Merative Support.

    What happens when I request a critical fix?

    Document Information

    More support for:

    Merative Social Program Mangement

    Software version:

    All Version(s)

    Operating system(s):

    Linux, Windows

    Modified date:

    26 February 2019