Release Management

Release management is a broad set of activities in software engineering process responsible for planning, scheduling the build, testing, deployment and support of software releases. Release management combines traditional project management with a detailed technical knowledge of the systems development lifecycle (SDLC) and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) practices. Release management is designed to provide greater control over the entire SDLC Phase – from design and development, through testing and quality assurance, to deployment and ongoing improvements .Release management team comprises of cross functional representatives from various departments like marketing, development, deployment, operations, quality who formally facilitate software release of quality solutions to customers. There are lots of tools that organizations can use like SVN, Phing which can help a lot while maintaining a releases and backups.

Why does release management fail?

Transition from application development to its deployment is not easy for most of the organization. There is growing distrust between Application Development and IT Operations as their goals and expected performance measures become more and more at odds with each other causing confusion about what changes should be made to the production environment. Some reasons for this distrust are

• Complex Business environments
• Complex Architecture
• Highly distributed environments
• Divergent priorities of application development and It Operations

Out of all the complexities listed above, it is the divide between Application Development and IT Operations that is the most problematic. When IT Operations and Application Development are divided, Release Management will likely fail even in the simplest environment. However, if both work in cohesion with unified goals, they will be able to overcome the problems created by complex business and development environment. Instead, both must work together to bring a release into production. Also one area where there always an issue is who manages changes that are already requested by business but are pending to be developed. Many IT operations / support teams don’t want to take it up as they feel that the development team is burdening them with work that is beyond their regular call of duty. Release teams would also be right in saying that changes coming it towards GO LIVE can be handled as part of support.

This is an area where senior management needs to step in and play a more proactive role in getting issues resolved. The decision can be to ensure that release teams strect the project duration and get changes done or agree with support teams that changes will be deployed post GO LIVE and managed by support. In both cases it is very important to get buy in from the respective teams to ensure that post the release business users do not get the runaround for requests they had already put in. This also helps to improve relationship between business and IT and generally builds a more cohesive work environment.

Many experts believe that IT release management is one of the most complex of the disciplines, because of the increasing sophistication in the software solutions, as well as the high level of diversity in requirements from one company to the next.  Additionally, some claim that IT release management poses more challenges than other technology service management processes, with issues such as bugs and defects, change requests (i.e., new features and functions), and security risks making it difficult to put significant structure around related activities. The better the process governing software changes, the better the changes managed. Better the changes managed better will be the quality those changes will have. Quality of software solutions is the real reason release management process exists.

About Author:

Harish Mani is senior consultant and is important part of Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. think Tank. He in Systems Plus actively contributes to technology and information security. He can be contacted at: harish.m@spluspl.com