Deployment processes and regression testing

One of the most important and most overlooked areas that can significantly affect availability and uptime of an application is the presence of a strictly enforced process to promote, characterize, verify, and regression test incremental rollout or fix packs and upgrades.

In industry studies and based on the experience of IBM®, the lack of sufficient automated integration testing, human and operator error, and lack of appropriate software change management processes to prevent those errors, is the single biggest factor that causes application downtime when there is no actual infrastructure failure.

The cost of setting up and investing in a robust and isolated testing environment that mirrors the configuration and a small amount of representative production like transactional data is usually much lower in comparison to implementing redundant systems and complex processes to handle issues with new solution rollout and software fixes. Any investment in this area goes a long way to prevent issues with failure and downtime.