97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

Chapter 20. Deploy Early and Often

Steve Berczuk

DEBUGGING THE DEPLOYMENT AND INSTALLATION PROCESSES is often put off until close to the end of a project. In some projects, writing installation tools is delegated to a release engineer who takes on the task as a “necessary evil.” Reviews and demonstrations are done from a hand-crafted environment to ensure that everything works. The result is that the team gets no experience with the deployment process or the deployed environment until it may be too late to make changes.

The installation/deployment process is the first thing that the customer sees, and a simple one is the first step to having a reliable (or, at least, easy to debug) production environment. The deployed software is what the customer will use. By not ensuring that the deployment sets up the application correctly, you’ll raise questions with your customers before they get to use your software thoroughly.

Starting your project with an installation process will give you time to evolve the process as you move through the product development cycle, and the chance to make changes to the application code to make the installation easier. Running and testing the installation process on a clean environment periodically also provides a check that you have not made assumptions in the code that rely on the development or test environments.

Putting deployment last means that the ...