Minutes ago, you released the latest version of your buzzword-compliant hosted application to your most important customer. It’s no small accomplishment for the team and is a potentially huge deal for your company. Your face lights up with a big, toothy grin as a wave of high-fives goes around the team. When the excitement turns into a collective sigh of relief, the team huddles up to depart for a well-deserved celebration dinner. Just then, the sound of a ringing telephone cuts through the air, freezing everyone in their tracks. It’s the support phone, and that could only mean one thing: deployment trouble.

(Full article: PDF)

Ah yes, if you haven’t been there then count yourself lucky. Getting an application properly seated in its production environment, time after time, requires careful planning and inspection. The slightest misconfiguration can tie up endless hours troubleshooting and quickly rack up cell phone minutes.

Read how to write and distribute diagnostic tests that let your application do it’s own first-level support in my recent article (pdf) for Better Software magazine.