After countless hours of hard work, sleepless nights, arguments, and times where you nearly lose yourself and go insane, you have now mustered enough confidence to deploy the particular software that you’ve worked really hard and really well on. You pray to whatever deity you believe that the software you’ve spent sweat and tears on works from the get-go. Should it work, all those lost hours would have been worth it, and even a small celebration is to be deserved. If it doesn’t, well, the aforementioned cycle of sleepless nights goes again, this time with a sprinkle of troubleshooting added. When you’re now confident that everything is fixed, you now go ahead and deploy that software release. It proves to be a success now, and you breathe a massive sigh of relief and give yourself an imaginary pat on the back. As the customers congratulate you for another successful deployment, they can’t help themselves but ask, “How is it done so efficiently?”
Before defining the software deployment plan, we should know what deployment is all about first. Simply put, the term deployment, as defined in software terms, refers to the process of moving revisions or updates from one deployment environment (for example, a computer system) to another one.
A software deployment plan is a document that outlines all the goals, important timelines, and the necessary approach to be taken whenever deliverables are to be implemented. This plan should also specify who will get the deployment items, as well as who will comprise the customer base and the predicted size of that target customer base.
Why would someone take advantage of software deployment and its services? Here are the advantages:
When software or application nears deployment or is still in the development process, strategies on how to deploy them are usually being planned already. Here are some of the strategies on how it is usually deployed. Keep in mind that these strategies are under the DevOps (a combination of software development and IT operations) methodology.
Now that we’ve discussed the deployment strategies, let’s go on and discuss the activities that are involved or that are to be undertaken during software deployment:
Now that you know what a Software Deployment Plan is, as well as some basics of software deployment, it is now time to know how a software deployment plan is successful, through the use of an effective software deployment plan. Here are the steps in writing one:
It is important to keep in mind that an effective deployment plan will always encourage and ensure that everyone involved has a sufficient understanding of how the execution of the plan should occur. What does proper and thorough documentation contribute to a software deployment plan? It simply helps provide a framework or a template for progress. The documents that are compiled should include functional vs non-functional requirements, update checklists for servers and applications, and outage and catastrophe recovery strategies. A section on how to handle data redundancy, protections, and downtime restoration can also be included. More to that, you should define the right times to implement these modifications across the deployment lifecycle.
As stated earlier, an effective software development plan should outline the recipients of deployment items, including the personnel who makes up the user or customer base and the size of that user base. The IT operations teams must decide who should get progress updates inside the organization. This section of the strategy assigns each stakeholder’s role in the process and describes how critical documents will be distributed. The main takeaway of this step is that everyone in the deployment team must have a defined role, and to never deploy software while leaving its customers in the dark.
The timeline of a software deployment process is not overnight. The procedure for this is lengthy, with several variables involved to keep track of. Outline unambiguous milestones in your documentation that indicate where the deployment should be at any given moment in time. Any software deployment strategy should include time estimates for initial planning, testing, monitoring, and fine-tuning, as well as other responsibilities of the management that are outlined in their scope of work.
The actual software deployment only serves to be a part of the software deployment plan. Be that as it may, it is still a very important component of the plan. IT administrators must be knowledgeable with the platforms that the program will be deployed on, as well as the appropriate operating systems, cloud providers, and supporting hardware. They should choose a host or a home site for the software download, which might be self-hosted, a public marketplace, or a native app store. A solid deployment also includes deployment testing to ensure that server and client programs are working properly and deployment monitoring.
Yes, there are enterprise concerns since a software deployment plan has a tendency to affect the remainder of the enterprise just as drastically as the IT. Concerns include the introduction of new tools such as a third-party application because they require adequate testing. Another concern of enterprises is that runaway processes and unsolved bugs tend to wreak havoc on stability; this is especially true when numerous business apps are running concurrently. Another concern is that operating systems also update from time to time, which leads to the staff testing those updates comprehensively.
If something breaks, it doesn’t necessarily mean the end. The most important thing to do is to stay calm instead of performing an immediate rollback. An immediate response can make things even worse for the software deployment process. First, you should determine if a rollback is really feasible and whether it will genuinely repair anything. Another thing you can do is to investigate whether the issue was caused by an existing or new feature. If the broken feature was not included in the current release, reverting to a previous version is unlikely to assist in the troubleshooting process.
Yes, it is necessary. Before commencing with the actual deployment of the software, it is important to double-check the software as well as to perform a comparison between your development environment and the actual environment where the software will be actually deployed. Why is it necessary, you may ask? Well, because even after testing is completed and quality assurance procedures are performed, glitches can still appear. It is always preferable to avoid glitches at any cost since it can be a daunting task to perform a full rollback or to apply any hotfix.
The success of a software deployment procedure heavily relies on the ability to create and automate a certain number of tasks and rely on them for the sake of minimizing issues to the company’s stakeholders as well as their customers. Having a proper software deployment plan will also help in a massive way. In this article, examples of an effective software deployment plan are readily available so that you can have a reference if you need one now.
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