Software deployment, including both clean installs and updates, is a crucial activity for all software vendors. It starts with a customer's order of a new release and incorporates all steps taken until the customer is satisfied with the deployed product. Using interviews as the main data collection method, we conducted a case study of four companies to discover their software deployment activities and challenges. The studied products were more complicated than pure COTS products. We noticed

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... e product characteristics that make deployment more challenging: 1) the product is tightly integrated to other customer systems, 2) the product offers various configuration options to support different ways of working, and 3) the product requires a pre-created, complex, real-world data model to be usable. We also noticed that software deployment is multifaceted, involving activities related to customer interaction; making integrations; and configuring, installing and testing the products.