Within an IT organization, release management practices aim to control and oversee all phases of code processing that lead to the final release of a given version of the software. These phases, within the software development cycle (SDLC), include the design, then planning, of the features and updates that will characterize the software release, and the development, testing, deployment, and maintenance phases of the software release. The release management process coordinates code development activities with IT operations to ensure that, when releasing software to production or distributing an app to end users, the code is stable, as free of bugs and defects as possible, and can respond to defined requirements based on business priorities and objectives.
What is release management
Release Management is the process by which you plan, program, test, and deploy a service, application, or component of your IT infrastructure. It involves both the release of new objects and updates. This practice serves to minimize risks, ensure product quality and maintain compliance, both regulatory and safety. For all intents and purposes, this is an activity that falls within the DevSecOps area of influence, as it requires coordinating code development activities with other IT activities to ensure security upon release.
The activities to be coordinated when releasing software or publishing an app are numerous. Without a doubt, it’s important to ensure your code is stable, bug-free, and doesn’t introduce security issues. However, you also need to monitor its performance, ensure it’s deployed on time and in the expected manner, and that interacting with other tools doesn’t create unexpected issues.
What is the release management process
The release management process involves organizing all phases of the software release lifecycle, from development to deployment, including organizational and management aspects that in many cases remain outside the strictly technical tables most oriented towards code construction and testing. This is a relatively new discipline, which has become necessary in recent years with the emergence of development practices in which releases are increasingly agile and frequent.
Precisely because its goal is to follow each release from origin to the end of its life cycle, in a hypothetical release management cycle we can identify the collection of change requests as the first step. Here’s what it looks like schematically:
Release management framework
To build a release management system capable of functioning and bringing added value to the software development process, it is essential to start from an initial assumption, common for all contexts where agility is a fundamental requirement: the greater the timeliness required, the more defined, precise, and detailed the management and organizational procedures must be. A good relationship management framework, in short, must be able to support continuous change, ensure the necessary flexibility, and make the release process as automated as possible so that it can be applied to modern development paradigms without introducing excessive overhead but maintaining a replicable and functional structure.
Digital transformation: more agile release management practices needed
Digital transformation, through the affirmation of IT paradigms such as the cloud, has profoundly changed the way businesses operate in the market, to the point that today software now occupies a crucial role in any business activity. Not only that, but competitive pressure today requires each company to differentiate its products and services, continuously improving the quality, functionality, and user experience of the applications that employees, customers, and consumers use daily to interact with the brand through various channels and touchpoints (physical stores, web, mobile, social networks, email). Consequently, today, to meet the needs of these users, software must be released more quickly and frequently, necessarily accelerating the release management process.
How to Speed Up Release Management with DevOps
Despite the increasing complexity achieved by digital applications and services and the need to accelerate the release management process, it is essential, as mentioned, to also maintain high software quality. However, this ends up becoming unsustainable for those IT organizations that still manage release management through a traditional and sequential approach, such as ‘waterfall’. The latter is too slow and, above all, lacks feedback and error correction mechanisms between phases (requirements analysis, design, implementation, integration and testing, deployment, maintenance) of the SDLC, requiring testing only at the end of the development process.
In such contexts, a methodology such as DevOps is able to generate automation and agility in the release management process, responding to modern software development and distribution needs.
DevOps Paradigm: The Benefits of CI/CD in Release Management
When properly implemented in an organization, the DevOps model allows you to automate the build, testing, and deployment phases of code, reducing release times and costs, and accelerating the speed and frequency of distribution of new versions, without negatively impacting the quality and reliability of the software that has been developed.
At the heart of the release management process that DevOps makes possible is the practice of CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery/continuous deployment) development and distribution, which, in essence, has the function of overcoming the typical integration problems (“integration hell”) encountered by applying classic approaches such as waterfall.
How CI/CD works
In CI/CD practice, each developer, once their code has been created, deposits it in a common repository, where it is automatically integrated (CI) with the portions of code (feature branches) developed by other team members, through the creation of a build, which contains all the changes, and is immediately subjected to automated testing, for the immediate identification of any bugs and operational defects. When such automation is extended from the development and testing environment, even to the production environment, it is also called continuous deployment and continuous deployment (CD), and the implementation of a complete CI/CD pipeline.
A fundamental approach for the ultimate protection of time, cost, quality and the entire business process.