By Saber J.1 min read
Maintenance or in-house team: how to decide
If nobody left inside can ship on a Friday, you do not have a team. You have a hope. Maintenance can be a bridge — not a black box.
The question is not “TMA or not”. It is: who can ship on a Friday, who knows production, and what happens in August.
Keep it inside if
You still have people who own the code, a test path, and a written run. Then outside help is a surge, not a substitute.
Hand over run if
The original team left, the wiki is dead, and every incident is a manhunt. Then you need a map, a fix queue, sized on-call, and a handover back — or a durable run.
We do not sell opaque volume. Documentation is part of the job. So is saying when the file is too wide for a small team.