Deployment friendly code

Question

Is writing deployment friendly code considered a good virtue on the part of a programmer?

If yes, then what are the general considerations to be kept in mind when coding so that deployment of the same code later does not become a nightmare?

Answer 1

The biggest improvement to deployment is to minimize manual intervention and manual steps. If you have to type in configuration values or manually navigate through configuration screens there will be errors in your deployment.

Answer 2

If your code needs to "call home", make sure that the user understands why, and can turn the functionality off if necessary. This might only be a big deal if you are writing off-the-shelf software to be deployed on corporate networks.

It's also nice to not have your program be dependent on too many environmental things to run properly. To combat this, I like to define a directory structure with my own bin, etc and other folders so that everything can be self-contained.