The third capability area is that of Deployment. Deployment deals with the act of actually putting the changes into a given target environment. It is not prescritive of how this happens. Many shops mechanically deal with deployment via their provisioning system. That is obviously a good thing and an efficiency gain by removing a discrete system for performing deployment activities. It is really a best practice of the most mature organizations. However, this taxonomy model is about identifying the capabilities needed to consistently apply changes to a whole application system. And, lets face it, best practices tend to be transient; as new, even better, best practices emerge.

Deployment Capability Area

Additionally, there are a number of reasons the capability is included in this taxonomy. First of all, the framework is about capabilities rather than technologies or implementations. It is important to be deliberate about how changes are deployed to all environments and simply because some group of those changes are handled by a provisioning tool does not remove the fact that not all are covered nor does it remove the fact that some deliberate work is expended in fitting the changes into the provisioning tool’s structure. Most provisioning tools, for example are set up to handle standard package mechanisms such as RPM. The deployment activity in that scenario is more one of packaging the custom changes. But the provisioning answer is not necessarily a solution for all four core areas of an applpication system, so there needs to be a capability that deals generically with all of them. Finally, many, if not most, shops have some number of systems where there are legacy technical requirements that require deployment to happen separately.

All of that being true, the term “Deployment” is probably confusing given its history and popular use. It will likely be replaced in the third revision of this taxonomy with something more generic, such as “Change Delivery”.

The sub-category of Asset Repository refers to the fact that there needs to be an ability to maintain a collection of changes that can be applied singly or in bulk to a given application system. In the third revision of the taxonomy, it is likely to be joined by a Packaging sub-capability.  Comments and thoughts are welcome as this taxonomy is evolving and maturing along with the DevOps movement.