Software applications are no longer stand-alone systems. They are increasingly the result of integrating heterogeneous collections of components, both executable and data, possibly dispersed over a computer network. Dier ent components can be provided by dier ent producers and they can be part of dier ent systems at the same time. Moreover, components can change rapidly and independently, making it dicult to manage the whole system in a consistent way. Under these circumstances, a crucial step of the software life cycle is deployment|that is, the activities related to the release, installation, activation, deactivation, update, and removal of components, as well as whole systems. This paper presents a framework for characterizing technologies that are intended to support software deployment. The framework highlights four primary factors concerning the technologies: process coverage; process changeability; interprocess coordination; and site, product, and deployment policy abstraction. A variety of existing technologies are surveyed and assessed against the framework. Finally, we discuss promising research directions in software deployment.