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Maintenance Plan
While the development of the Mobile Trail Mapping application is the team's primary focus during the school year, once the project is turned over to the LCTA, the Rose-Hulman developers will no longer have an active role in its upkeep. As such, it's important to establish a plan for maintaining the MTM applications into the future.
The primary maintainability gesture the team will make is by providing copious documentation for the MTM project. In addition to an extensive project plan and architecture description, the code provided will be well-commented and documented. The team has chosen the Doxygen documentation engine, which works directly on project comments and uses the well-established Javadoc standard.
Providing large amounts of documentation, much of it in the code, will not only improve system understanding and ease transference to new maintainers, but will also aid the team's current development efforts and simplify future changes made by other developers which may pick up the MTM project. As such, documentation is one of the most crucial efforts the team can undertake to help future work.
The Linn County trails system opens in mid-April, and the team has already planned deadlines such that the MTM suite will be released by that point; as the academic year does not end until May, this means that the team has several weeks to gradually transfer program ownership to the LCTA and the new maintainers. This transition period will be very helpful in ensuring the new developers understand the codebase and can effectively implement any changes that need to happen once the current team leaves the project. A Transitions page has been established to help in this effort.
The team has been advocating and using an open, test-driven, Agile process since the beginning of the MTM project; as such, it will be much easier in the future for the project to gather new talent and ensure that changes adhere to the MTM requirements and vision. The publicly available GitHub projects can be cloned by any developer, lowering the barrier to entry for new team members, and the established body of tests make sure that no well-intentioned changes can accidentally break application functionality.