Not installing at customer site? Don’t install for QA!

Professional software development and deployment begins as soon as you first compile your code.  Automate - test - then automate some more! It is very tempting to look at a single build or a single integration release as if it were the end of your work - get that done, and you're home.  You're not. You should not do build steps for a release team, you should not do installation for your QA team.  If they need that help, your customers will too.  Package your software carefully and thoroughly so that none of them need you.  Your cost for doing a manual deployment step - touch a marker file, perhaps, or hand-editing a text file - is tiny.  But it's only tiny for you.  Each such 'little step' gets terribly costly in later stages of build, release, and deployment.  Are you doing them from memory?  Did you drop a step you used to need?  How do your release engineers or your customers know about it?  Did you update the docs used by QA and release for the last four (weeks, months, years)? Everything you have to do for someone downstream is as costly as a bug fix.  Treat it like one!