Watch a demo. Organizations improve the quality, speed, and efficiency of building or updating software by focusing on release management.
This is the process of planning, scheduling, and managing a software build through the stages of developing, testing, deploying, and supporting the release. Techniques like Agile development, continuous delivery, DevOps, and release automation have helped optimize release management.
The velocity of this process has accelerated recently, to the point where several years ago Amazon passed the mark of 50 million code deployments a year — more than one per second. As a discipline, it draws from both traditional, business-focused project management and technical knowledge of the systems development life cycle SDLC and the IT Infrastructure Library, a set of practices for IT service management. Done effectively, release management increases the number of successful releases by an organization and reduces quality problems.
Productivity, communication, and coordination are improved, and the organization can deliver software faster while decreasing risk. These improvements mean the team can repeatedly produce quality software with shorter times to market, which allows the company to be more responsive to the operating environment. Release management also helps standardize and streamline the development and operations process. The team implements auditable release controls, thus creating a repository for all releases throughout the life cycle.
Having a single, well-documented process that must be followed for all releases increases organizational maturity. Increased standardization and the focus on product allow teams to draw more useful lessons from experience and apply them in future releases. Operations departments appreciate the increased coordination with developers because there are fewer surprises. In short, release management breaks down team barriers across multiple functions in an IT organization. As a result, you can improve product delivery holistically.
Cross-functional and technical reviews are essential to minimizing the inevitable pain after go-live. Over time, however, the software development process came to more closely resemble the product cycle in which products are supported, improved, and repeatedly relaunched over a long lifetime. In this framework, the release was not the end goal of development, but rather a transition point for support and revision.
With this increased complexity came a greater need to coordinate the phases. Release management is part of the larger IT discipline of change management , which deals with the inherent turbulence of software development, where stakeholder requirements seem endlessly fluid and the landscape of compliance and regulation continues to shift.
To navigate this environment, software engineering processes must be well synchronized, and release management helps achieve this. Note: Change management is not to be confused with organizational change, which is the reshaping of culture, turnover of people, and internal restructuring of organizations.
A key function of their job is to help the organization assess risk and impact with impartiality. To develop your change management process, you will find it helpful to have standard ways for proposing project changes and recording changes as they are approved and made.
Jumpstart the effort by downloading the following free templates for a change proposal and change management log. A change proposal outlines the type and scale of change, and is often the first step in a change management process.
Describe why the change is needed, expected outcomes and impacts, time and resources required, and any other factors that need to be reviewed. This template also includes space for adding descriptive information as well as sections for calculating costs and benefits. A change management log is a document that tracks who requested what change and when, the status of the change request, its priority, and resolution information.
If you need a more thorough record, include other details such as the type and impact of the change. This log template is designed for keeping track of vital information so that change requests can be easily prioritized, addressed, and referenced later.
Not all software is created equal. Functional requirements and quality metrics are stringent, and the software has to go through many layers of approval before it ever gets near a plane. From the repository, the artifacts are released to a client production environment for application deployment. So, you can think of release management as the glue that holds together the interconnected but distinct tasks that comprise software engineering: design, development, testing, deployment, maintenance, and business and customer requirements.
A release comprises more than just the core software engineering functions. While developers obviously view a release as the successful delivery of a finished product, there are several supporting business activities that are also involved, such as training salespeople and customer support staff and advertising and marketing the new release. These activities need to occur in sync with the release tempo, adding complexity to the release management process. Moreover, release management is not just for newly designed software.
Modified software goes through the same process to ensure that the stakeholders get what they want. The actual release can be done manually, or, increasingly, it can be automated, depending on how mature the release management process is. Amazon uses an automated release process to achieve a new release every second. Historically, weekly, monthly, and quarterly updates have been more typical for software development teams.
Releases can come in many different forms: as a physical product in a box, as a download from a website or server, as a push to a device from a mobile app store, or as a seamless update to a web-based application. All software engineering groups — whether big or small and across all industries — use release management to smooth the process. They may apply it to software used internally or sold as a product.
Software engineering groups big and small employ release management across all industries, and they can use the resulting software to run their own product or systems, or to sell as a product in itself to clients.
One of the development approaches most conducive to release management is called DevOps , a term formed by combining development and operations. As its name suggests, DevOps attempts to increase coordination between developers and operations in software engineering by using a combination of automation and monitoring at all stages of software development to decrease time-to-market and improve customer satisfaction.
Development Work Order: This is a work order for the development or modification of a software application or system. DevOps Team: Since the whole point of DevOps is to increase coordination between the development and operations functions, creating a separate team makes the term a misnomer.
Despite the name, the term usually refers to key team members on both the development and operations sides who work to coordinate the two functions. Installation Work Order: Similar to a development work order, an installation work order is for the installation of a software application, system, or infrastructure component.
Product Owner: The product owner on a development project is the main stakeholder. Project Manager: A project manager takes charge of the direction for a single product. Release Manager: The role of the release manager is to plan, coordinate, manage, and schedule all the items that comprise a release. All these items do not necessarily have to originate from the same product. For example, this manager must also coordinate work on any other products that are designed to integrate with the new release.
Release Policy: This is a set of rules for how to deploy releases to the live operational environment. Different release policies apply to different releases, depending on such factors as impact and urgency. Release Record: A release record documents the history of a release, from the planning to the closure of the development process. Release Unit: This term refers to a set of configuration items that a team simultaneously tests and releases into the live environment to implement approved changes.
Service Owner: A service owner takes on high-level accountability for a specific IT service. Quality Manager: A quality manager ensures that a release meets stipulated standards. They may have release managers reporting to them. Release management is sometimes described as a super discipline, because it involves overseeing several interconnected but distinct disciplines, notes configuration management expert Salman Khwaja. One of the central practices in release management is code management , which is the process of managing changes to computer code.
Using code modules or collections of lines of code, code management simplifies and speeds up the act of making changes to code as well as other code-related activities, like maintenance and debugging. One type of code management that constitutes an important aspect of release management is version control. This refers to the management of code for different releases of the same software for the purposes of comparison and reference. Code management follows many of the principles of records management.
To perform their role effectively, a release manager must foster facilitation and collaboration, mainly between teams but also within teams. Release managers are typically experienced professionals themselves, so they may be called upon to pitch in.
Processes and policies are critical to effective release management. Problems are bound to arise, and, when they do, there must be protocols to address them. The release manager also functions as a gatekeeper or guardian of the production code. They know every time a code artifact moves out of the organization. Over a number of releases, it becomes possible to measure for productivity and throughput metrics so that the efficiency of release management becomes visible.
Common metrics include such things as velocity and burndown rate. It is important to consider all aspects of the release process and communicate it to each member of the team. And that is exactly what project release management is for. Want to hire a professional team to perform full cycle development and release management? Nothing can be better than getting a review from our happy clients who recommend us and trust us their business.
NJ, United States. Ana, who was my project manager, was very professional and was always understanding of my vision and what I wanted. The form was not completed, please try to fill the form in again or contact us via email hello gbksoft. Your request has been received. Our client manager will get in touch within the specified hour window. What does release management stand for? Contact us. Write us. Important notion. What are the main elements of product release map in Agile?
They are the approximate release of the project, plans for every release, subsequent iterantion and plans of them, feature development within each iteration, and individual tasks that are nedded to develop and deliver the features. Who is responsible for release management?
All processes are controlled by a manager who is responsible for scheduling, managing and coordinating releases. This person also take all risks under control and resolves issues timely to avoid release delays and shifts of schedule.
What are DevOps responsibilities? What is the difference between build and release? A release implies the official launch of the ready solution, while when we say build we mean a developed version of the software that is given to testers and being checked.
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Sorry, something went wrong. Thank you for your trust! The more loosely coupled a value stream, the easier it is to deploy. Enterprises releases are almost always interconnected.
This means that t1,4 may need to be deployed with d3,4,. The stages of development of the two value streams must be coordinated to keep efficiency high and minimize waste in the release process.
Balancing these interdependencies while optimizing the work of IT teams is incredibly complex, particularly when adding in governance requirements. While automation eases this workload, this alignment must be ensured when preparing releases and deployments. Even in federated DevOps teams someone — often the product owner — must take on release manager responsibilities.
In a large enterprise, release trains may consist of multiple value streams or a value stream can consist of multiple release trains. These value streams will have interdependencies that require activities to be coordinated so a release can be successful. As the number of software applications grows and delivery accelerates, the risks to releases and the enterprise overall increase.
This includes the risks of:. Not meeting regulations, security standards, or other governance requirements can expose an enterprise to security vulnerability, fines, loss of customer trust, and additional work to bring applications back into compliance. Release Scheduling conflicts. Environments, interdependencies — even APIs in loosely coupled systems — can result in a release being held from deployment.
This leads to wasted time, effort, and internal conflict. Release Timing. ITIL v3 defines six approaches for release and deployment management. Most companies utilize some variant of these approaches though they may refer to them by different names.
It is also common for different approaches to be used for different types and sizes of projects. Big Bang Approach: new or changed service sis deployed to all users at the same time. Phased Approach: services are initially deployed to a part of the user base and if no issue observed, the deployment is repeated to other user groups via a scheduled rollout plan. Automated Approach : changes are deployed into the production environment using automated workflows and distribution mechanisms.
Manual Approach : frelies on manual activities to distribute a release often used when the release has system dependencies that require manual checking before or after deployment. Release management processes coordinated by a skilled and experienced release manager who is equipped with the right set of tools to do their job effectively can all help a company orchestrate safe and effective changes to their IT environment.
We use cookies to offer you a better browsing experience, analyse site traffic, personalize content, and serve targeted advertisements. Read about how we use cookies in our Privacy Notice. Our Cookie Policy provides information about managing cookie settings. What is Release Management? Release management support : provides guidelines and support for the deployment of releases including the roles that are involved in other parts of the release and deployment management process Release planning : defines the scope and content of releases according to release management policies, assigns authorized changes into release packages and defines a schedule for building, testing and deploying the release Release build: deals with the actual development of all required release components including the issuance of all necessary work orders and purchase orders for components sourced from vendors and ensuring that all release components are ready for validation and testing Release deployment : manages the deployment of release components into the live production environment and the transition of documentation and training to end-users and operating staff.
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