With an increasing number of people, businesses, and organizations going digital, there’s been a correspondingly higher demand for new software and web applications. And since systems are becoming more sophisticated and powerful, these new apps must also be more complex to function correctly with these state-of-the-art devices.
Unfortunately, this increased demand for more sophisticated software often causes developers to rush new products to market before they are ready, resulting in bugs, failures, and crashes. Customers get angry and impatient as the company scrambles to design and release a fix, whether in the form of a patch or a full version upgrade.
Consequently, this demand for software applications to be released in a timely fashion—and actually work right the first time—has created the need for what the development world calls the “release management process.”
This Release Management process article gives you the details on release management, its definition, characteristics, goals, origin, and workings. If you’re currently involved in any stage of software and application development (or plan to), then this article is for you.
Let us begin by understanding the Release Management process.
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Release management is the process that deals with the management, planning, scheduling, and control of an application build through every applicable stage and environment—from development to testing to deployment.
Developers need to use release management anytime they either produce a new product or create changes or new versions to an existing one. But, many developers are faced with the daunting task of releasing multiple products at an ever-increasing pace. Between new releases and having to create updates and fixes for already-existing software, the development process can potentially become hopelessly jammed up and disorganized.
Now that we have learned the release management process, let us look into its history.
Release management is a relatively new concept in the world of software engineering. The process has been a slow evolutionary change, as engineers shifted their emphasis from project-based to product-based results.
Software developers used to consider each release as a project, not a product with a full lifecycle. But as the software development process increasingly resembled the product cycle, and the goal of a release was not just an end-product but a transition point between support and revision, release management grew in importance.
Continual advances in best practices and technology have served as a catalyst for release management’s rising importance in today’s development world.
Next, let us learn about the release management process flow.
Release management follows a sequence of steps covering elements like planning, scheduling, and managing application development—guiding the project through the development, test, deployment, and support stages.
Existing techniques like continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), DevOps, agile development, and release automation have made release management easier. The discipline brings together the best of both worlds: traditional business-focused management strategies and a set of IT service management practices consisting of the IT infrastructure library and the technical knowledge of the systems development life cycle (SDLC).
Speaking of agile development, this article gives a more detailed, in-depth look at agile release plans.
The release management process is typically broken down into the following stages, and overseen by a release manager:
Create a release plan employing resources such as the abovementioned SDLC. The plan breaks the release into stages, sets up the overall workflow, and explains who is responsible for each task. The plan should have:
After the product finally goes live, the development team should meet to discuss how the deployment went and the release’s performance.
We’ve seen what the release management workflow looks like, but now let’s take a brief look at the individual components that make up the typical release management process.
Release management exists to meet specific and critical goals in product development. The objectives are:
With such exacting and wide-ranging goals, it’s not surprising that release management brings many benefits to any software application development team. The advantages of release management include:
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Businesses today need service management to maximize their value by effectively using information technology. ITIL, an acronym for Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is a highly popular set of detailed IT service management practices.
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A solutions architect can earn an annual average of USD 110,663, according to Glassdoor, with a high of USD 143,000. Since new apps are in greater demand, companies need more professionals to design increasing numbers of software releases, which in turn requires service management professionals. So, if you’re looking for an exciting position that offers plenty of security and generous benefits, check out Simplilearn today and take that first step in a better career!
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