Planning transition iterations
Software may be deployed into a production environment at the end of any Construction
or Transition iteration. Deployment to production before the end of the project
may be done to drive down risk by validating the application, deployment scripts,
deployment environment, and to get valuable feedback from operations and systems
teams, as well as end users. These early deployments are often done on a limited
scale in terms of target audience or only partial applications are deployed.
For the deployment to work, one or several iterations are focused on work necessary
to successfully release the system. In the Transition phase, one or several
iterations may be dedicated to preparing for a smooth deployment. The number
of iterations depends on the complexity of the system and various other factors,
as listed here. When planning for deployment, the Work Items list should be
updated with relevant tasks related to these considerations:
-
Resolving defects
-
Testing installation or deployment scripts to avoid surprises in actual deployment
- Updating any operations and support test environments used to
simulate production problems
- Performing release-specific testing efforts, such as pilot or beta testing,to
a subset of your end-user community where the system is deployed
-
Conducting acceptance reviews with stakeholders, including a final release acceptance testing effort where
people outside of the team are involved and decide whether it truly meets their needs
-
Finalizing relevant documentation, such as operations and system manuals, end-user documentation and release notes
-
Creating physical collateral, such as installation media
- Replacing or installing physical assets, or both, including workstations,
servers, and network components
-
Replacing existing software with new versions
- Updating existing databases, including any relevant data migration and
database schema changes
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Production data population
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Training end users and operations and support staff
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Fixing any discrepancies discovered during the transition phase
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Setting up management and operational systems and processes
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Training the team that is taking over maintenance and evolution of the system
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Deploying the software to the production environment
See [AMB07] for more information.
Reviewing transition iterations
Transition iteration reviews have a different focus from other iterations
in the project lifecycle. The goal is not to brainstorm about what features
to develop next. Instead, reviews will assess the release management resources
and procedures, the quality of the software, and how prepared users and
operations teams are to face a move of the software into the production environment.
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