Feb 17th, 2025
Software Deployment Decoded: Your Essential Pre-Launch Checklist for Success
Software deployment is a complex process that actually begins way before you actually deploy your software. It can be helpful to have a guide that you can refer to and disseminate around your organization to ensure smooth deployment across all departments.
This article is intended as a guide for making that guide. When you go about making your own deployment checklist, seek input from your own stakeholders, managers and employees to tailor a guide specific to the needs of your business.
What is Software Deployment?
Software deployment is the way software is released into the world. Ideally, if you’re using agile development strategies, deployment shouldn’t be seen as the “end” of development: rather it is one stage in a continuous process called the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
Once a piece of software is live in the world, it becomes part of your company’s technical ecosystem and must be monitored, updated, and maintained. It will also provide crucial data that you can use to make decisions about new features and future developments.
Importance of Smooth Software Deployment
Software deployment directly impacts the effectiveness and efficiency of the overall technical system. Sloppy or lazy deployment can introduce bugs, cause crashes, or lead to downtime that negatively impact your users’ experience, hurt your brand, and introduce potential weak points for bad actors to exploit.
Main Software Deployment Strategies
Most organizations that rely heavily on their software utilize a few major deployment strategies, either in part or in whole. These strategies can often be combined, and the use case for each will depend on the size, scope, and essentiality of the feature being deployed.
Blue-Green Deployment
This strategy involves keeping two separate deployment environments running at all times: a blue version (the current deployment) and a green version (the version containing the new code.) Once all tests have passed in the green version, traffic is routed from the blue version there.
Canary Deployment
In this strategy, the new features are released to a small subset of users first, and closely monitored for issues. If no anomalies or problems are detected, the deployment is slowly rolled out to the rest of the userbase.
Rolling Deployment
The deployment strategy gradually releases changes to different servers or regions, so that the old version of the software is replaced in stages. As new versions are monitored and assured to be working properly, users are routed to them and more regions are rolled in.
Feature Flags
In this method, a new version of the software is deployed with code included to allow certain parts to be turned on or off. Typically, the new version is deployed with feature flags turned off, and they are gradually turned on as needed.
A/B Testing
A/B testing is a process that allows distinct changes to be released to certain user groups, and their responses to those changes monitored.
Continuous Deployment
Continuous Deployment (CD) is a method that can be employed in tandem with any of these methods and involves running and suite of automated tests and then automatically deploying changes once all those tests pass. It is considered standard practice in Agile development.
Key Checklist to Verify Before Launch
Prior to launch, the most important thing you must do is test your software. There are many types of tests critical for ensuring smooth deployment, and running some version of all of them is recommended.
1. Unit Testing
Unit testing should happen any time an engineer makes a commit to your repositories. Ideally, you will have automated checks set up to run tests anytime someone commits and reject the code if any of the tests fail.
2. Usability Testing
Once unit testing has passed, you should test the user experience to ensure it meets company standards. There are automated ways to do this (Selenium, for example) however, it’s also a good idea to have a real human use the software and provide feedback.
3. Performance Testing
Load testing, speed testing, and scalability testing are all important for ensuring that your new changes don’t bog down the system or degrade user experience.
4. Security Testing
Penetration testing, vulnerability scans, and testing of user roles and authentication procedures help maintain your system’s overall security and avoid introducing potential weaknesses.
5. Regression Testing
Ensure that the new changes don’t break any of the existing functionality. Sometimes, changes introduced in one place in the codebase can have unexpected and unintended consequences way downstream.
6. Compliance and Legal Check
Ensure that any changes you’ve introduced meet GDPR and other data privacy regulations, and any relevant laws and industry regulations like HIPAA, SOC2, etc.
7. Beta Testing
Once you’re ready to deploy, it can be helpful to release changes to just a small subset of your users (as with canary deployment or blue-green deployment) to see what their reaction to the new features is.
8. Documentation
An often-overlooked step, creating good documentation for your changes will ensure that future devs can work on the software without breaking things or having to spend a long time getting up to speed with the codebase.
9. Final Check-Ins
Check-in with key stakeholders, ensure any external dependencies are up-to-date and functional, finalize marketing materials and make sure support is ready to handle any issues.
10. Deployment Prep
Create a plan for deployment, and a strategy for rolling back if something goes wrong. Verify that your staging environment (if you have one) closely mirrors production, and make sure your monitoring systems are ready.
Common Mistakes to Avoid During Software Deployment
Even small mistakes can cause major disruptions to service. Make sure you avoid these common pitfalls:
- Skipping any step of the testing process
- Not having a rollback plan
- Neglecting user feedback
- Not communicating with stakeholders or other teams
- Not monitoring the deployment process or time thereafter
- Deploying during high-traffic times
- Not preparing support
Conclusion
Done right, software deployment should be a seamless part of your company’s software development cycle. Setting up the proper automations, communicating with the relevant parties, and having a plan in place in case something goes wrong will go a long way in making your next deployment smooth and pain-free.
