Installation is only part of deployment

We devoted several chapters and appendices of this book to the creation and running of the installation setups. This is only part of the deployment process, one step in the overall deployment or implementation plan.

Pre-implementation

Before we implement any application or component in a production environment, we need to prepare for this implementation. This involves a lot of planning, determining the project scope, determining the budget (both the funding of the project and the amount of effort by the development team), formulating the Communications Plan, procuring any additional software or hardware, and establishing the Implementation Plan. We wrote Chapter 2, ‚“Planning for Success, ‚½ to detail many of the items developers should be concerned with when planning and preparing for deployment.

Establishing an Implementation Plan provides the deployment team with the steps necessary to properly implement the application. The plan needs to take into account the operations of the customer and the development organization. It also establishes the final deliverables ( prototypes , data, software, hardware, training, user guides, and help files to name a few). Larger projects might be more detailed because of the complexity; smaller projects might boil this down to a simple e-mail to your client listing the required steps. Do not fall into the trap of thinking the Implementation Plan is this huge document that requires more overhead and effort than developing the code that is implemented. Each deployment has different requirements and effort in this respect.

Implementation

The implementation phase of the deployment is simply stepping through and executing the Implementation Plan. If the customer and the development staff request it, record the outcome of each step of the process, who was involved, and the status. If a step performed in the deployment requires communication with other members of the deployment team, make sure this important task is carried out. We address this phase in Chapter 8, ‚“Release and Post- Release Tips. ‚½

Post-Implementation

The post-implementation phase is where you monitor the establishment of the production environment and customer expectations, as well as support ongoing technical problems, the normal bug reports , and enhancement requests . We address this phase in Chapter 8, ‚“Release and Post-Release Tips, ‚½ and Chapter 9, ‚“Support and Ch-Ch-Changes. ‚½