By the end of FY26, design, document, and implement procedures for the FIT to help in identifying new maintainers for NOAA software

[k-doering-NOAA]

[k-doering-NOAA]

We discussed this at our April FIT meeting. We shared how maintenance works within our work groups and how difficult a problem sustaining maintenance (or making a deliberate sunsetting plan) is - ultimately, sustainable software maintenance is something that needs to be supported by leadership and needs funds. We are wondering if the FIT committee's role could mostly be to provide information to leadership so that developer's needs are met.

Some next steps we discussed:

• A page of orphaned tools/ tools that need help with maintenance
• Collect info from developers about succession planning/funding (to help identify existing maintenance gaps of high-impact software). This could be a survey, or collected anecdotes. Possibly this could be explored at the meeting @lpfeif leads over the summer, if desired.
• Metrics on tool use (maybe not the most helpful)