Release engineering, frequently abbreviated as RE or as the

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Releng, is a sub-discipline in

software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

concerned with the

compilation Compilation may refer to: *In computer programming, the translation of source code into object code by a compiler **Compilation error **Compilation unit *Product bundling, a marketing strategy used to sell multiple products *Compilation thesis M ...

, assembly, and delivery of

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

into finished products or other software components. Associated with the

software release life cycle 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 ...

, it was said by Boris Debic of Google Inc. that release engineering is to software engineering as manufacturing is to an industrial process:

Release engineering is the difference between manufacturing software in small teams or startups and manufacturing software in an industrial way that is repeatable, gives predictable results, and scales well. These industrial style practices not only contribute to the growth of a company but also are key factors in enabling growth.

The importance of release engineering in enabling growth of a technology company has been repeatedly argued by John O'Duinn and Bram Adams.2013. Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Release Engineering. IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA. While it is not the goal of release engineering to encumber software development with a process overlay, it is often seen as a sign of organizational and developmental maturity. Modern release engineering is concerned with several aspects of software production: ; Identifiability: Being able to identify all of the source, tools, environment, and other components that make up a particular release. ; Reproducibility: The ability to integrate source, third party components, data, and deployment externals of a software system in order to guarantee operational stability. ; Consistency: The mission to provide a stable framework for development, deployment, audit and accountability for software components. ; Agility: The ongoing research into what are the repercussions of modern software engineering practices on the productivity in the software cycle, e.g. continuous integration and push on green initiatives. Release engineering is often the integration hub for more complex software development teams, sitting at the cross between development, product management, quality assurance and other engineering efforts, also known as

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 to a ...

. Release engineering teams are often cast in the role of gatekeepers (e.g. at Facebook, Google, Microsoft) for certain critical products where their judgement forms a parallel line of responsibility and authority in relation to production releases (pushes). Frequently, tracking of changes in a

configuration management Configuration management (CM) is a process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's performance, functional, and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life. The CM proc ...

system or

revision control In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...

system is part of the domain of the release engineer. The responsibility for creating and applying a version numbering scheme into software—and tracking that number back to the specific source files to which it applies—often falls onto the release engineer. Producing or improving automation in software production is usually a goal of the release engineer. Gathering, tracking, and supplying all the tools that are required to develop and build a particular piece of software may be a release engineering task, in order to reliably reproduce or maintain software years after its initial release to customers. While most software engineers, or software developers, do many or all of the above as a course of their work, in larger organizations the specialty of the release engineer can be applied to coordinate disparate source trees, projects, teams, and components. This frees the developers to implement features in the software and also frees the

quality assurance Quality assurance (QA) is the term used in both manufacturing and service industries to describe the systematic efforts taken to ensure that the product(s) delivered to customer(s) meet with the contractual and other agreed upon performance, design ...

engineers to more broadly and deeply test the produced software. The release engineer may provide software, services, or both to software engineering and software quality assurance teams. The software provided may build tools, assembly, or other reorganization scripts which take compilation output and place them into a pre-defined tree structure, and even to the authoring and creation of installers for use by test teams or by the ultimate consumer of the software. The services provided may include

software build In software development, a build is the process of converting source code files into standalone software artifact(s) that can be run on a computer, or the result of doing so. Functions Building software is an end-to-end process that involves ma ...

(compilation) automation,

automated test In software testing, test automation is the use of software separate from the software being tested to control the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes with predicted outcomes. Test automation can automate some repetitive bu ...

integration, results reporting, and production of or preparation for software delivery systems—e.g., in the form of electronic media (CDs, DVDs) or electronic software distribution mechanisms.

Related disciplines

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 ...

Application lifecycle management Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the product lifecycle management (governance, development, and maintenance) of computer programs. It encompasses requirements management, software architecture, computer programming, software testing, so ...

* Build automation * Continuous integration *

Change management Change management (sometimes abbreviated as CM) is a collective term for all approaches to prepare, support, and help individuals, teams, and organizations in making organizational change. It includes methods that redirect or redefine the use of ...

*Packaging & Deployment *

Porting In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desi ...

- Product Line Engineering includes porting of a software product from one platform to other. *

Release management 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 releases. Relationship with processes Organizations that ...

Software configuration management In software engineering, software configuration management (SCM or S/W CM) is the task of tracking and controlling changes in the software, part of the larger cross-disciplinary field of configuration management. SCM practices include revision ...

- Although release engineering is sometimes considered part of Software Configuration Management, the latter, being a tool or a process used by the Release Engineer, is actually more of a subset of the roles and responsibilities of the typical Release Engineer. *

Software deployment Software deployment is all of the activities that make a software system available for use. The general deployment process consists of several interrelated activities with possible transitions between them. These activities can occur on the S ...

Software release life cycle 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 ...

Software versioning Software versioning is the process of assigning either unique ''version names'' or unique ''version numbers'' to unique states of computer software. Within a given version number category (e.g., major or minor), these numbers are generally assig ...

Related disciplines

References

Further reading