Be prepared to shift your code management and deployment processes when transitioning from prerelease deployments to post production releases. Plan to put into place a well defined build and deployment process as well as build management personnel. The more critical the system the tighter the controls will need to be to minimize risk in lost productivity.

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As your custom development effort approaches live product status make sure you have a code management scheme that will minimize the risk of problematic code reaching production servers. Design your production branch, integration and development branches in a manner where the production code is kept safe from unnecessary risk. Consider employing a build manager to validate the preproduction branches prior to merging changes into product.