Analyzing deployment from the perspective of software handover and maintenance

Deployment is an important constituent process in software handover and a critical prerequisite step to software maintenance. Despite this, there are no studies dealing with the role of deployment within software handover and maintenance. In this paper, we study deployment activities that are critical for a successful software handover and maintenance. We evaluate them in twenty software organizations. Our goal is to investigate their status and usefulness from the handover and maintenance perspective. Our results show that the deployment process, although it strongly varies in the organizations studied, adheres to our process model and provides good support for executing handover and for determining future maintenance effort.