The Deployment Discipline

Begin high-level deployment planning.  This effort will focus on initial release planning for your system, identifying your deployment audience, and identifying your potential release window.  Your main goal should be to determine a general deployment strategy: based on your understanding of your project, does it make sense to release the software all at once or as phased releases?  Because you won't have finalized your architectural strategy yet, you may decide to begin deployment planning during the Elaboration phase instead. 

Develop release notes.  Your release notes should summarize the "good things to know" about the current release of the system which you're building.  Point form notes are likely sufficient for now.

Develop initial documentation.  In addition to delivering working software, you will also need to deliver system documentation (operations, support, system overview, and user documentation), as well as your training materials.  If you're creating new documents then you can at least begin to define their structure and add point form notes to them.  You do not want to put much work into the documents now because your system is still evolving.

Update your plan.  As development of the system progresses, so should your deployment plan. You will likely find that you need to negotiate your deployment plan with your operations and support departments, as well as with other projects that are also planning on deploying software, so that your project fits into your overall corporate system deployment plan. 

Deploy the system into pre-production environments.  You should regularly deploy your system into pre-production environments for QA/testing as well as for demonstrations to your stakeholders.  The more experience you get doing this the easier your actual deployment into production is likely to be.

Finalize documentation.  The majority of the system documentation (operations, support, system overview, and user documentation) is typically written during this phase because the system's functionality has stabilized.

Announce the deployment.  You should announce the anticipated deployment schedule including the expected training and installation dates. You need to train your operations, support, and user communities as appropriate during this phase. 

Train people. Training your project customers – users, management, operations staff, and support staff – is always an important part of deployment.  Remember that your customers may need training beyond that of learning how to work with your application.  For example, this may be the first time that some users are working with a PC, a browser, or even a mouse.  Similarly, this may be the first time that your operations staff is working with a new technology that your system users, such as an EJB application server, and therefore will need to be trained and educated in that technology to qualify them to work with your system. 

Deploy the system into production.  At this point you will perform any required data conversion, which may be a one-time batch job or a gradual conversion of the data as it is needed by your users.  You may decide to run your new system in parallel with your existing system for several weeks to ensure that it actually works in production.  You may also choose to deploy your system to a subset of your user community, called a pilot release, to verify that it runs for the smaller group before you choose to "inflict" your system on everyone.  You may also need to deploy a version of your software to the support department so they can simulate production problems when users contact them for help.

This page is tailored with permission from Ambysoft Inc.'s Agile UP Product

Original page is Copyright © 2005 Ambysoft Inc.