Vantaggi
Overall, the team that supports the product I was assigned to is a good, solid group, that functions well together. Somehow they have cobbled together a way to maintain a 30 year old application, based on 30 year old application design. The Customer Support Team (based in Meridian, ID) takes great pride in their work, and have been able to build long-lasting relationships with many in their customer base.
Svantaggi
Unnecessary issues due to lack of developer discipline, and refusal to use source code management the way it is intended. During my time with this team, I witnessed multiple instances where the solution for a given issue was tucked away on one of the developer's machines, instead if having been checked in, awaiting either a peer review or a weekly build (neither of which exist). Deployment of code that has not been fully vetted in the appropriate SDLC Testing phases without developer hands on it (Unit testing first, then Black box function testing). This code is given as thorough a "once over" as the Support team can manage (no dedicated, in-house QA TEAM that does more than document what the features are and how they work) From here "fixes and enhancements" are "beta tested" by direct clients, with the Support team handling the feedback as "temp-hi calls" that still may not receive attention until the next day. From the Technical perspective, the entire system is built on a design pattern that has been abandoned by most of the Software development industry. EVERYTHING (including the selection of individual UI elements and behavior) is based on a single stored procedure in the database, which makes automated testing nearly impossible. The closest thing to documented Business Rules is the User Manual for a given Release. This makes no accommodation for change, should one of the two developers decide to leave. And from reading previous reviews, the re-write that everyone acknowledges is needed, may not happen soon enough to beat Microsoft's EOL for Windows 7, and Server 2008 platforms.