A software deployment risk assessment heuristic for use in a rapidly-changing business-to-consumer web environment

John Comas, Ali Mostashari, Mo Mansouri, Richard Turner

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    1 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    In the 24/7 web industry, business owners can feel a constant need to push the latest and greatest software to the live site in order to remain competitive and ensure growth. However, the bottom line to the business must always be that the site is fully available and functional to consumers. The business cannot make money if a customer is greeted with a maintenance page. Also, the business reputation of the company can be severely damaged if the web site proves to be unavailable to customers or if orders aren't received due to improper fulfillment. The constant rapid updating and changing of software can cause severe site instability to the point where the business can fail. Systems integration engineers are often the last line of defense in preventing this type of catastrophic failure. Due to the need for rapid software integration, a heuristic for quantitatively measuring risk in the system is invaluable to determine what software is riskiest to deploy and where problems are most likely to occur. The software deployment risk assessment heuristic presented in this paper allows systems integration engineers to determine where these risks are most apparent in the system and to explore where best to focus their efforts for ensuring the least disruptive deployment method for live production systems.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)107-126
    Number of pages20
    JournalInternational Journal of Software Engineering and its Applications
    Volume5
    Issue number4
    StatePublished - 2011

    Keywords

    • Assessment
    • Code
    • Components
    • Deployment
    • E-commerce
    • Heuristic
    • Production
    • Qualitative
    • Risk
    • Software
    • Systems integration
    • Tier
    • Web

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