Creating a production environment

A production environment establishes standards and acts as a foundation for measuring and improving the service level. Without a production environment the support engineers face a monumental task and each support incident takes longer to close. User reported malfunctions often cannot be reproduced by the support staff without having to go to the actual user device and carry out the diagnosing/debugging/fixing cycle. After the event it is difficult or even impossible to tell if other devices have the same issue - waiting to surface.

The cost of establishing a production environment is saved many times over by eliminating costly mistakes, providing the means to plan ahead properly and maintaining a stable environment for the user community.

The reference device is the device on which you create a new package. In most production environments a device should be set aside for this purpose. Since a package is created from changes, the state of the device before the installation of your software is of little consequence.

The reference device should have the same operating system as the target devices on which you want to install the finished package. Most other differences between the reference device and the target are taken care of by the SmartDelta system and the intelligence that is built into the package.