When you develop a software program or application, you create them for your users. It’s said that simply making it available to your intended audience isn’t enough.
It’s highly recommended to optimize it for the best user experience and usability. This is where the practice of software deployment is believed to be highly significant.
From a user’s perspective, a software’s quality is determined by its usability or how well it can complete its intended task. Meanwhile, their experience is influenced by how intuitive the interface is.
It’s important that people don’t feel unintelligent for not knowing how to use the application presented to them. Then for developers, the usability and user experience illustrate the system’s success.
Application deployment may be a very sophisticated concept to grasp especially if you’re just getting started in software development. In fact, in a given software development team, there’s a specific role for managing the process of application deployment.
Furthermore, it’s a very important component of the process of developing software or updates for your users. Therefore, understanding what this process is, how it works, and the reasons app deployment fails is important.
With all that said, here are six facts you need to know about application deployment:
1. Application Deployment Explained
Software deployment is essentially the process of making an application publicly accessible by installing and configuring them on a uniform resource locator (URL) on a server. Having evolved over the years, developers today have integrated automation into the process combining it with manual tasks making it more efficient.
As time progresses, application makers keep finding more methods to speed up the application deployment process. By integrating this into the software development process, developers can make sure that their application or software works and meets its intended users’ demands.
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2. Application Deployment VS Application Release
When it comes to application or software development, you might mistake it for a software release. The main difference is that when it comes to deployment, you’re conducting all of the technical tests to make it available and usable.
Meanwhile, releasing an application comes after deployment wherein you’re finally trying to divert traffic to the latest application version.
3. History of Application Deployment
Over the years, application deployment evolved with the implementation of automation being one of the recent innovations. Yet much like any technology, it has its humble origins.
Back then, if businesses want to incorporate software programs into their operations, they need to employ the help of technicians to code and maintain computer instructions on large and bulky servers on-site.
Things changed when the concept of virtualization was created before the second millennium. Essentially, the process involved testing or using an application and inserting a layer between the operating system and software.
This helped with avoiding hurting the system especially when the application was just being tested. On one hand, though it eliminated the need for upkeeping heavy equipment it’s still not convenient.
Years pass and containerization was invented. It’s essentially a form of operating system virtualization with applications being run in isolated spaces called containers.
It’s a complete and portable computing environment containing everything an application needs to run. This allowed for a safer and convenient way to deploy apps. Moreover, it also lets others access the application remotely.
Overall, containerization has allowed modern-day developers to have lesser waste and deploy applications or software much more efficiently and quickly.
4. The Step-by-Step Process of Application Deployment
If you’re new to the information technology (IT) world and are still studying before getting yourself a job in IT, you might wonder what the process of application development is.
After all, it’s such an important stage in the creation of software or applications. The process of application deployment has three steps which are:
- Deployment – In the deployment stage, you’ll be choosing a method of deployment, determining the amount of time needed, and sending and testing codes to clients’ ends.
- Testing – Testing particularly includes statistics and analytics to monitor your users’ activities. Here, you can adjust the application according to the user’s experience.
- Monitoring – Finally, with monitoring, you’ll be distributing your software then making improvements and updates along the way whenever a bug is discovered or spotted.
5. Reasons Why App Deployment Fails
As application deployment is an important part of the creation of your application, it’s vital that you do this step right. In fact, several people make mistakes that make it difficult to successfully deploy their applications.
With this in mind, here are some of the common reasons app deployment fails:
- Poor scheduling – Poor time scheduling includes giving yourself an inadequate amount of time for testing the application and resolving the bugs that were found.
- Failing to set your objectives properly – In other words, having either a really low or irrationally high success criteria isn’t recommended. Not properly defining your application objectives make it impossible to reach them in the first place.
- Poor test setup – Failing to test the right aspects of your application or software will negatively impact the deployment process.
- Not observing test results – As with anything that requires improvements, you need data to tell you what aspects need improvement. By failing to pay attention to this, you’ll either fail to impose much-needed changes on anything or boost the wrong parts of your software.
6. Key Tips in Ensuring Successful Application Deployment
With the knowledge of why some app deployments fail, it’s time to know some of the best practices used to deploy applications successfully.
Since it’s a crucial step before officially releasing your application, it’s important to know how to do it right. With that said here are some of the best practices used to successfully deploy applications:
- Make the installation structure simple and ensure there’s little file distribution as much as possible.
- Keep your deployment mechanism consistent and avoid changing it between the testing and deployment phases.
- Stay organized by removing unnecessary files to avoid an installation process that’ll be prone to errors. As an added benefit, this will make your software lighter on the device accessing it all the while improving the user’s experience.
- Secure your application so that your users can use your software without the fear that their data might get stolen.
- Stay prepared for any issues that might arise and act fast on reinforcing them.
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Summing It All Up
With creating software, it’s critical that you do whatever it takes to ensure an excellent user experience. One of the actions your team can take is to go over the process of application deployment.
Nevertheless, application development can be very sophisticated which is why it’s just as important to understand how it works.
If you’re new to the world of software or application development, hopefully, the points mentioned above have given you enough insight to understand an overview of the topic.
Besides, if you’re an experienced software developer or member of the tech community, then hopefully this feature has served as a good refresher for you.
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