The deployment guide is the documentation handed over to the System Administration, Network Administration and Database Administration team, elucidating the steps that need to be taken in order to release the changes from the Development or QA environment into either the Pre-Production (Staging) or Production environment.

The deployment team members are usually responsible for maintaining the production environment and transitioning verified changes from the QA Environment into the production environment.

The first step in the deployment process is usually to use the deployment guide to understand the deployment process, following which an attempt to deploy the software change from QA to the Pre-Production or Staging Environment will be made. At this point, if the deployment process is deemed defective or deficient in any manner, the build will be marked as a failure and rejected.

If the build is deployed successfully to the Staging area, the build is deemed successful, based on the pass/fail criteria provided and a date and time is provided for when the build will actually be deployed to production.

The responsibility of the deployment guide resides with both the developers and the build engineers who will aid in both constructing it and validating the release.