Strategies for Deployment

In terms of strategic planning, application deployment is often the most overlooked area of the development cycle. Many teams will leave deployment planning until the day before they're due to deploy and hope for the best. When a problem arises during deployment there's a rush to fix it and no real effort to diagnose where the problem came from. A better approach is to automate as much of the deployment process as possible. This is especially useful if you're deploying the application regularly to a test server because you can test your deployment script as part of the test process. Using this approach also ensures that the application is deployed in exactly the same way for testing as it is for production.

Another benefit of automated deployment is that it reduces the barriers to giving the client early beta releases of the application to play with. This way you can start to gather user feedback early and start responding to that feedback right away.

Most deployment can be scripted using shell scripts, however we find that it's preferable to use something like Ant as much as possible. In that way we can keep as much of our automation together and reuse automated steps such as the compile step between different automated processes.