Deployment Process
June 4, 2008
A major benefit of using a build and deployment process is that it simplifies deployments and ensures consistency of code through all environments, from development and test environments right through to the production and disaster recovery environments.
The code base is deployed with a single-click approach where the application, version number and environment is specified. Because there is little to no manual intervention you can be assured that all evironments with the same version will have the same code.
This has a great advantage over manual deployment environments where there is a chance that some parts of the deployment could be missed or not implemented consistently through human error, resulting in environmental bugs, which causes much difficulty and wasted time in troubleshooting errors. Often it is much easier to diagnose bugs in a development or local machine, and in such situations the code may work locally, but not in a different environment. Here it would be more difficult to find the error in the specific environment and time is taken away from fixing real bugs, not bugs introduced by the incorrect deployment of code.
Our deployment process utilises the packaged software created on the build machine after each successful build, and includes any managed code, sql scripts, configuration and any other miscellaneous files that need to be deployed. An automated nightly build can be configured to deploy to an integration environment every night, giving much confidence that there will be no deployment issues.
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