Installation Phase

1. Installation Phase Trisha Cummings

2. Installation • Has three phases • Transition • Production • Retirement

3. Transition • This is the phase where the product is deployed across the organization. • Keep in mind that in the Rational Unified Process, you don´t have to wait until the whole product is completed before rolling it out to production. • Instead a minimum set of functions to make the system usable is defined, implemented and then deployed as soon as possible to get the feedback of the users. • Those feedbacks are incorporated in the next iterations. This is actually the most important rule in the RUP process.

4. Many companies discard this rule and as a result, pay a high price in the end: a system that does not work and is very costly to fix afterwards. • Rolling out the system in small pieces allows the management to have an accurate estimate about the status of the project, be proactive, and make the right decision at the right time. • On the other hand, having the end-users test each delivery and incorporate their feedback in the next releases guarantees the outcome of the final product and eliminates any surprises of having the wrong system or a system that doesn't support the business vision of the company.

5. Transition Phase • The primary goal of the Transition phase is to roll out the fully functional system to customers. • During Transition, the project team focuses on correcting defects and modifying the system to correct previously unidentified problems. • The major milestone associated with the Transition phase is called Product Release.

6. Transition. This phase focuses on delivering the system into production. There will be testing by both system testers and end users, and corresponding rework and fine-tuning. Training of end users, support, and operations staff is done.

7. Production • This phase encompasses the period of the system lifecycle at which you operate and support a system until it’s either replaced with a new version or retired and removed completely from use. • Change management of reported defects and new requirements is crucial to ensure that changes are assigned to future development cycles. • This phase applies to the lifetime of a single release of your software. • To develop and deploy a new release of your software, you need to cycle through the four development phases again.

8. Retirement. • The focus of this phase is the removal of a system from production. • Eventually systems become obsolete or are superseded by other systems and must be removed/sunsetted.

9. Installation and Deployment • The successful installation of new or updated systems into production is one of your operations department's critical responsibilities. They will often be actively involved in your project team's deployment efforts and will often be responsible for managing the deployment process. This will include the distribution and installation of hardware and software, both initial program loads (IPLs) and installation of any fixes or patches to existing software.

10. To successfully install new items into production, your operations department must understand the existing technical infrastructure, and deal with activities such as software, hardware and network inventory management. • Your operations department will be actively involved in the evaluation, acceptance and purchase negotiation of technical infrastructure components. • Physical environment management, including but not limited to power and network issues, physical security, disaster recovery and air conditioning, is typically the purview of operations.

11. Document management—including network architecture diagrams, system operations guides and job documentation—is an important part of these efforts. • Accurate documentation and models are critical to the success of your operations efforts because they enable your staff to perform an impact analysis of proposed changes to your production environment. • Without a solid understanding of what's currently in production, you can't possibly determine the potential risks of changes, nor can you address problems effectively once they occur. • For discussions of effective modeling and documentation techniques, you should visit the Agile Modeling homepage (www.agilemodeling.com).

12. Log management is also an important part of system operations. Various types of logs—such as job logs, history/ transaction logs, database logs, problem logs, message logs and system audit logs—are produced by various aspects of your technical infrastructure. • The logs are used by operations staff for problem resolution and general system monitoring, and therefore must be managed appropriately.

13. Smooth Operation • What's important to your operations staff? • Their primary concern is to guarantee the smooth operation of your organization's technical environment within defined service levels. • This includes security issues: the physical security of your organization's computing infrastructure, as well as electronic security.

14. Operations staff must be able to recover your system from problems, as well as troubleshoot to determine the cause of errors. • The configuration capabilities and deployment strategy for your system will also be of concern to operations staff, particularly during your project's transition phase.

15. Operations Quality Gate • Most operations groups will have a set of defined criteria that your system must pass before it's deployed into production. • This is often called the operations quality gate, and the effort to verify your system in this manner is referred to as operations testing.

16. Operations testing will verify that a system will work in your production environment without adverse effects on other systems. • In other words, you want to prove that your system plays well with others. From the point of view of the Unified Process, operations testing typically occurs in the Transition phase of your project, although it can also take place in the Construction and even Elaboration phases.

17. For example, if your organization uses new technologies, such as Web services or Enterprise JavaBeans, as part of your architectural prototyping efforts in the Elaboration phase, you may want to run your prototype through operations testing to ensure that it will work in your actual environment. • First, identify the criteria against which your software will be tested. • Operations staff are critical project stakeholders in your project—people who should be involved with it from the very beginning.

18. They should be able to define critical constraints for your system—constraints that you need to know about when you're first building your system. • Furthermore, you may discover that you need to negotiate changes to your production environment, such as introducing new technologies or upgrades to existing facilities, to support your system. • These alterations often need to be started sooner rather than later.

19. Never Underestimate Operations • System operations is a complex activity that's critical to the success of your IT organization. • It's no good putting software into production if you can't keep it there, and your operations staff are the people who do just that. • To deploy your system successfully and keep it running in top form, you need to look at the whole information technology picture: System operations may play a supporting role, but it's a crucial one.

20. Resources - Credits • http://www.ddj.com/dept/architect/184414775 • http://www.awprofessional.com/articles/article.asp?p=24671&seqNum=7&rl=1 • http://www.tometasoftware.com/rational_unified_process.asp