ABSTRACT
Software sustainment includes the processes, procedures, people, materiel, funding and information required to fully support, maintain and operate the software portions of a system. Retesting and Configuration Management play an important role in the process regardless of the type of sustainment performed. The Life Cycle Management Plan is a potential option for containing the software sustainment planning information. The selected Software Sustainment organization may be the customer, a customer-related organization, a contractor, or the original Developer organization who is awarded a separate contract for operating and maintaining the system. Sustainment becomes more complicated with the increased use of commercial off-the-shelf software products. System retirement may also be called system decommissioning or system sun-setting. The goal is to remove the system from production as seamlessly as possible. After the original system development activities are successfully concluded, adequate facilities, support software, support personnel and needed documentation must be available so that the software can be maintained in an operational and sustainable condition.
