development in support environment

[mac]

Do any of you work in a support environment? I wonder how do you structure your development efforts in such environment? At my company, officially we put support above all else, development included. Unofficially, we also recognize that it is development of tools that let us do support in the first place. An unspoken rule so to speak. Over the years my group has produced a significant number of support tools that have been and are used throughout the company.

What bothers me, is that they could be better had we put more emphasis on development of said tools. How is is it done in your company? Do you have developers as part of your support group? How do you handle constant interruptions to your project when something more important comes up?

Just wondering

Thanks for reading,
mac

[Eranga]

First of all this is not the correct place to discuss about your question, because you are talking about a generic topic, not specific with Java fundamentals. So I moved to correct place. If you have any question about that please let me know.

Regarding your question. Normal procedure I'm following is engineering test before release the project to QA team. In that engineering test we need to use our own set of tools. I'm just make my own tools to test, based on the project and on what I want to test.