... by Sloppy Deployments (Part 1 of 2)
By Maciej Zawadzki – April 2004

Deployment management, although not strictly part of build management, is still a very important topic, as it can render very strong build management practices almost useless. Recently I've ran into several development teams that have what I would call "terrible" deployment practices. The cardinal sin perpetrated by all these teams comes down to modifying deployed artifacts directly. The problem with that is that the act of modifying deployed artifacts breaks the traceability of those artifacts back to the source. All of the sudden, you find yourself in a situation where you do not know what is actually deployed. And that is not a very good situation to be in :)