Deployment friendly code

Question

Is writing deployment friendly code considered a good virtue on the part of a programmer?

If yes, then what are the general considerations to be kept in mind when coding so that deployment of the same code later does not become a nightmare?

Answer 1

The biggest improvement to deployment is to minimize manual intervention and manual steps. If you have to type in configuration values or manually navigate through configuration screens there will be errors in your deployment.

Answer 2

If your code needs to "call home", make sure that the user understands why, and can turn the functionality off if necessary. This might only be a big deal if you are writing off-the-shelf software to be deployed on corporate networks.

It's also nice to not have your program be dependent on too many environmental things to run properly. To combat this, I like to define a directory structure with my own bin, etc and other folders so that everything can be self-contained.

Answer 3

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "deployment friendly code." What are you deploying? What do you mean by "deploying"?

If you mean that your code should be transferable between computers, I guess the best things to do would be to minimize unnecessary (with a given definition of "unnecessary") dependencies to external libraries, and document well the libraries that you do depend on.

Answer 4

The whole deployment process should be automated to minimize the human errors. The software should not be affected by the envrionment. Any new deployment should be easily rolled back in case any problem occurs. While coding you should not hard code configuration values which may be different for each environment. Configuration should be done in such a way that it can be easily automated depending upon enviroment.

Answer 5

Client or server?

In general, deployment friendly means that you complete and validate deployment as you complete a small story / unit of work. It comes from continual QA more than style. If you wait till the last minute to build and validate deployment, the cleanest code will never be friendly.

Everything else deployment, desktop or server, follows from early validation. You can add all the whacky dependencies you want, if you solve the delivery of those dependencies early. Some very convenient desktop deployment mechanisms result in a sand-boxed / partially trusted applications. Better to discover early that you can't do something (e.g. write your log to c:\log.txt) than to find out late that your customers can't install.