ZDLC-Based Modelling and Simulation of Enterprise Systems

Production environments in large enterprises are expensive to maintain, support and enhance. Organisations take extreme care to provision and configure their environments and they are very wary to change. This is because a small change may result to a domino effect of failures resulting in costly system downtime. Consequently, engineers are also looking for reliable ways of testing environmental changes prior to deploying to production. One way is to maintain an exact replica of the production environment which is used to test and verify changes (software and hardware changes). However, this is an expensive solution to test small recurrent changes and doubles the support cost. Another approach is to simulate. This work is about simulation and how the principles of Zero Deviation Life Cycle (ZDLC) methodology have been employed to simulate changes of deploying software to an enterprise production environment in the banking arena.