Domain · Ongoing maintenance
What it covers
Keeping the platform reliable, secure, bug-free, and capable of handling growing volume. This is the domain that has no external forcing function — loop owners don't notice maintenance is good; they notice it immediately when it's not.
Activities
- Reliability, uptime, and performance.
- Security and data protection.
- Bug fixing and regression prevention.
- Infrastructure scaling as volume grows.
Operations
Reliability and performance operation
Monitoring raises an incident or degradation → response triggered → resolution → root cause analysis → preventive action queued or applied. Every incident produces a preventive action.
Security and data protection operation
Vulnerability detected or requirement introduced → assessment → remediation or implementation → audit trail captured.
Bug fixing and regression prevention operation
Bug reported or detected → reproduction → fix → regression test added → deployment → verification.
Infrastructure scaling operation
Capacity metric approaches threshold → scaling plan executed or scheduled → validated against actual volume growth.
Notes
Maintenance work is the quietest work in the Platform Loop — when it's done well, nobody notices. This makes it vulnerable to being de-prioritised in favour of louder work (new features, high-visibility product strategy items). The discipline is to treat maintenance as a first-class claim on time, not as the work that happens when there's capacity left over.