Software deployment
Software deployment is all of the activities that make a software system available for use.[1]
The general deployment process consists of several interrelated activities with possible transitions between them. These activities can occur on the producer side or on the consumer side or both. Because every software system is unique, the precise processes or procedures within each activity can hardly be defined. Therefore, "deployment" should be interpreted as a general process that has to be customized according to specific requirements or characteristics.[2]
The complexity and variability of software products have fostered the emergence of specialized roles for coordinating and engineering the deployment process. For desktop systems, end-users frequently also become the "software deployers" when they install a software package on their machine. The deployment of enterprise software involves many more roles, and those roles typically change as the application progresses from the test (pre-production) to production environments. Typical roles involved in software deployments for enterprise applications may include: