Release management is the process of managing, planning, scheduling and controlling a software build through different stages and environments; it includes testing and deploying

software release A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...

Relationship with processes

Organizations that have adopted

agile software development In software development, agile (sometimes written Agile) practices include requirements discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of Self-organizing communities, self-organizing and cross-functional team, cross-functi ...

are seeing much higher quantities of releases. With the increasing popularity of agile development a new approach to software releases known as

Continuous delivery Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time and, following a pipeline through a "production-like environment", withou ...

is starting to influence how software transitions from development to a release. One goal of Continuous Delivery and

DevOps DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (''Dev'') and IT operations (''Ops''). It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. DevOps is complementary t ...

is to release more reliable applications faster and more frequently. The movement of the application from a “build” through different environments to production as a “release” is part of the Continuous Delivery pipeline. Release managers are beginning to utilize tools such as

application release automation Application-release automation (ARA) refers to the process of packaging and deploying an application or update of an application from development, across various environments, and ultimately to production. ARA solutions must combine the capabiliti ...

and continuous integration tools to help advance the process of Continuous Delivery and incorporate a culture of DevOps by automating a task so that it can be done more quickly, reliably, and is repeatable. More software releases have led to increased reliance on release management and automation tools to execute these complex application release processes.

Relationship with ITIL/ITSM

In organizations that manage IT operations using the IT service management paradigm, specifically the

ITIL The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of detailed practices for IT activities such as IT service management (ITSM) and IT asset management (ITAM) that focus on aligning IT services with the needs of business. ITIL d ...

framework, release management will be guided by ITIL concepts and principles. There are several formal ITIL Processes that are related to release management, primarily the Release and Deployment Management process, which "aims to plan, schedule and control the movement of releases to test and live environments.", and the Change Management process In ITIL organizations, releases tend to be less frequent than in an agile development environment. Release processes are managed by IT operations teams using IT Service Management ticketing systems, with less focus on automation of release processes.

References

External links

"Current Trends in Release Engineering 2016" - Academic Course by Software Construction Research Group, RWTH Aachen, Germany
* *{{Google books, id=BR9ppkdnIrQC, title=Project Management: Best Practices for IT Professionals, page=193, text=release manager
Release and Deployment Management in the ITIL Framework
Software project management Version control Software release