Foundations of enterprise software deployment

Abstract

While software engineering has so far mainly focused on software development, software deployment is now emerging as a new research field. Software (or application) deployment is a complex process, which covers all the activities that have to be carried out, from the end of the development itself, on the producer sites, to the actual installation and maintenance of the application on the consumers' computers. This article sets up grounds for enterprise software deployment, which is the large-scale deployment of complex applications in large companies.