Software modification by group to minimize breakage

A method is employed to group computers to facilitate application of a software modification to the computers. The method includes identifying a global set of computers to which it is desired to apply the software modification. Based on characteristics of software configurations of the computers of the identified global set, the computers of the identified global set are grouped into a plurality of clusters. Grouping the computers into a plurality of clusters includes processing syntactic information about the computers to identify the plurality of clusters and applying the software modification to the computers of the clusters. The software modification is applied with an adjustment for each cluster in an attempt to avoid software breakage of the computers of that cluster.