Activity: Verify Manufactured Product

Purpose To ensure that the manufactured product is complete, and useable. This activity is sometimes referred to as the 'first article inspection'. It serves as a quality control activity to ensure that the retailed product has all the required attributes and artifacts.
Steps Verify the Product against the Bill of Materials Follow Product Installation Instructions Check the Product for Usability Ship the Product to Customers
Input Artifacts: Bill of Materials Product	Resulting Artifacts: Product
Frequency: Once prior to ordering the production run, or distributing the product for customer use.
Role: Deployment Manager

Workflow Details:

Deployment

Package Product

Verify the Product against the Bill of Materials

The Deployment Manager needs to be satisfied that the manufactured product is complete. Completion in this instance means that the product has all the constituent parts listed in the Bill of Materials. The Deployment Manager needs to go through the checklist and identify the product components.

Follow Product Installation Instructions

Having made sure that the manufactured product has all the required elements, the Deployment Manager has to ensure that the customer can load and run the software. This step is really a check to verify the clarity of installation instructions, and how well installation artifacts work in the final product.

Check the Product for Usability

Having installed the software, the Deployment Manager should go through the various tutorials and try out the product. The Deployment Manager should look at the product help features, and documentation to ensure that all is in order.

As an added precaution, the Deployment Manager should go through the exercise of reporting bugs, or calling the Help Line to check for responsiveness.

Ship Product to Customers

Assuming that the product passes the visual and usability tests, the Deployment Manager can sign-off the product release and make it available for shipment to customers. Product shipping is beyond the scope of a software development process, however, it is assumed that a software product development organization has established the right marketing channels and infrastructure for product distribution.