Applied Microsoft Business Intelligence

Chapter 16Designing and Implementing a Deployment Plan

Application lifecycle management (ALM) includes all phases of developing software, such as gathering requirements, writing code, testing software, managing deployments, and more. By following ALM best practices, business intelligence teams can increase their development productivity, reduce delivery times, and minimize maintenance disruptions. You can easily design and implement a deployment plan, an ALM best practices, using the Microsoft suite of business intelligence tools.

This chapter walks you through all the information you need to create a deployment plan for your business intelligence application. You will learn the definition of a deployment plan, why you must have one for your business intelligence solution, and some of the stumbling blocks you may face while implementing the deployment plan. You also learn how to deploy some of the business intelligence products, and finally, the steps needed to implement the deployment plan.

What Is a Deployment Plan?

After you have gathered requirements from the users, designed your architecture, and developed and tested your code artifacts, you need to put your code somewhere for consumption. Moving your code and any associated assemblies, artifacts, and configurations for someone to use is known as code deployment. Code deployment is an often overlooked, but important, part of the application lifecycle, and, as such, should be managed appropriately.

CODE DEPLOYMENT