Software release and deployment at Exact: a case study report

For vendors of product software it is becoming more and more difficult to manage and control the software configurations of all their users at the customer\'s site. It is labour intensive and error-prone to (semi)automatically register detailed lists of the software artefacts in use by each customer. To alleviate this problem the Deliver project proposes an Intelligent Software Knowledge Base that contains all facts about all artefacts together with their relevant attributes, relations and constraints. In this way, high-quality software configurations can be calculated automatically from a small set of key parameters. It also becomes possible to pose what-if questions about necessary or future upgrades of a customer\'s configuration. This document describes a case study performed at Exact Software into the processes of release and deployment. The results of the case study are presented, existing of process descriptions of the development, release and deployment processes at Exact Software, a comparison to the Intelligent Software Knowledge Base, and an analysis of the result

Release and deployment at Planon: a case study

This case study report describes the research results of a case study at Planon into the processes of development, release, and deployment. The research was done to document the release and deployment processes at Planon, to uncover strengths and weaknesses in these processes, and to compare Planon to other product software vendors. The case study was performed by doing interviews and examining development documentation, Planon software, and internally used tools. The results of the case study are organizational descriptions, Planon software descriptions, and the descriptions of the development, release, and deployment processes. The main conclusions of the case study are twofold. First the case study shows that striving for more integrated software knowledge management can relieve the processes of release and deployment. Secondly, the case study displays that extensive variation management can effectively increase the customer base for a software vendo

A process framework and typology for software product updaters.

Product software is constantly evolving through extensions, maintenance, changing requirements, changes in configuration settings, and changing licensing information. Managing evolution of released and deployed product software is a complex and often underestimated problem that has been the cause of many difficulties for both software vendors and customers. This paper presents a framework and typology to characterize techniques that support product software update methods. The framework is based on a detailed process model of software updating. Finally, this paper assesses and surveys a variety of existing techniques against the characterisation framework and lists unsolved problems related to software product updater

Integrated SCM/PDM/CRM and delivery of software products to 160.000 customers

The release and deployment of enterprise application software is a potentially complex task for software vendors. This complexity can unfortunately result in a significant amount of work and risk. This paper presents a case study of a product software vendor that tries to reduce this complexity by integrating product data management (PDM), software configuration management (SCM), and customer relationship management (CRM) into one system. The case study shows that by combining these management areas in a single intelligent software knowledge base, software release and deployment processes can be automated and improved, thereby enabling a software vendor of enterprise software to serve a large number of customers with different product configuration

Design and Implementation of Signed Executables for Linux

We describe the design and implementation of signed executables for Linux, which provide the following strong integrity guarantees: the inability to tamper with executables and the inability to add new unauthorized executables. Unlike other implementations, ours covers statically and dynamically linked executables as well as executable scripts. In addition, we reduced the overhead of signature verification to almost zero by caching the successful verification results. The negligible overhead enables signature verification to be used as a basic building block for other applications of which some are described in this paper. Also UMIACS-TR-2001-4

A case study report on the development, release, and deployment processes of ChipSoft.

This report contains the results of a case study we performed of the Dutch software vendor ChipSoft. This case study is part of the Deliver research project, and it focused on ChipSoft's release, delivery, and deployment activities. We performed the case study to gain insight into these activities which, in turn, would enable us to propose new ways to ease their effort and reduce their risks. The case study consisted of recording the development, release, delivery, and deployment activities of ChipSoft and comparing these with the activities of the model proposed by the Deliver project. The description and comparison enabled us to both evaluate the Deliver model and propose improvements to the activities of ChipSof

A case study of the release management of a health-care information system

This paper describes a case study of the release management of CS-ECIS, a health-care information system developed by the Dutch software vendor ChipSoft. We performed this case study to gain insight into the release management activities of a real-life company. This insight would enable us to pro-pose new ways to ease the effort and reduce the risks asso-ciated with release management. The case study consisted of recording both the release management activities for CS-ECIS and its related development and deployment activities, and subsequently comparing these activities with our initial release management model. The description and comparison enabled us to both evaluate and improve this initial model. 1

A process framework and typology for software product updaters.

Product software is constantly evolving through extensions, maintenance, changing requirements, changes in configuration settings, and changing licensing information. Managing evolution of released and deployed product software is a complex and often underestimated problem that has been the cause of many difficulties for both software vendors and customers. This paper presents a framework and typology to characterize techniques that support product software update methods. The framework is based on a detailed process model of software updating. Finally, this paper assesses and surveys a variety of existing techniques against the characterisation framework and lists unsolved problems related to software product updater