Software deployment is all of the activities that make a software system available for use.

The general deployment process consists of several interrelated activities with possible transitions between them. These activities can occur at the producer site or at the consumer site or both. Because every software system is unique, the precise processes or procedures within each activity can hardly be defined. Therefore, deployment should be interpreted as a general process that has to be customized according to specific requirements or characteristics. A brief description of each activity will be presented later.

The release activity follows from the completed development process. It includes all the operations to prepare a system for assembly and transfer to the customer site. Therefore, it must determine the resources required to operate at the customer site and collect information for carrying out subsequent activities of deployment process.

Activation is the activity of starting up the executable component of software. For simple system, it involves establishing some form of command for execution. For complex systems, it should make all the supporting systems ready to use.

Deactivation is the inverse of activation, and refers to shutting down any executing components of a system. Deactivation is often required to perform other deployment activities, e.g., a software system may need to be deactivated before an update can be performed. The practice of removing infrequently used or obsolete systems from service is often referred to as application retirement or application decommissioning.

The adaptation activity is also a process to modify a software system that has been previously installed. It differs from updating in that adaptations are initiated by local events such as changing the environment of customer site, while updating is mostly started from remote software producer.

The update process replaces an earlier version of all or part of a software system with a newer release.

The complexity and variability of software products has necessitated the creation of specialized roles for coordinating and engineering the deployment process. For desktop systems, an end user is frequently also the software deployer when they install the software package on their machine. For enterprise software, there are many more roles involved. Additionally, the roles involved typically change as the application progresses from test (pre-production) to production environments.