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 Management

 

 

Software version:

All Versions

 

 

Operating system(s):

Linux, Windows

 

 

Modified date:

26 February 2019