Deploy Early and Often

The installation/deployment process is the first thing that the customer sees, and a simple installation/deployment process 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 customer before they get to use your software thoroughly.

Putting deployment last means that the deployment process may need to be more complicated to work around assumptions in the code. What seemed a great idea in an IDE, where you have full control over an environment, might make for a much more complicated deployment process. It is better to know all the trade-offs sooner rather than later.

The installation/deployment process is essential to the productivity of your customers or your professional services team, so you should be testing and refactoring this process as you go. We test and refactor the source code throughout a project. The deployment deserves no less.