Release management is the systematic process of planning, scheduling, testing, and deploying software releases. It ensures that deployment services evolve alongside customer needs with efficient delivery of applications while maintaining the integrity of the production environment.
Release management is an IT term used frequently across a range of industries. At its most basic, release management describes overseeing the development, testing, deployment, and support involved in designing and releasing software. Release management incorporates goals and long-term strategic planning, as well as the individual tactical steps employed to help reach those goals.
Many businesses take release management even further, beyond the technical process of deploying IT products and features, and into managing adoption, business-process changes, and other internal factors related to rollout.
Organizations that have fully embraced automation may consider release management an unnecessary, outdated process. But while methodologies such as Agile might increase the speed of software deployment, they do not address problems of siloed teams and inefficient delivery processes. Release management helps keep everyone on track and looking at the bigger picture. It does this by reducing risk, optimizing deployment efficiency, and providing increased customer value.
Standardized requirements and governance policies that can be repeated across multiple projects help eliminate many of the risks associated with product release. Release managers can adapt individual processes to better meet the needs of specific releases, and scale these processes as the business continues to grow.
By aligning focus on increasing positive value, reducing negative value, and improving development and release times, release management provides a clear path to improving software-deployment efficiency.
Incorporating customer feedback and using an iterative process of development and testing, release management gives businesses the opportunity to continually increase the value delivered to the end user.
Release management aligns teams with common objectives designed to improve product quality and the customer experience. With this in mind, you can evaluate the success of your release management initiatives using the following indicators:
Was the release launched by the established deadline? Were individual tasks completed on time?
Was the project completed within budget?
Were current users able to continue using the product or service without any negative interruption?
Did the release overall improve the end-user experience?
Change management and release management are closely related but distinct processes within IT and software development. While both deal with controlling changes, they focus on different aspects and stages of the change lifecycle.
Change management includes tasks like assessing, authorizing, requesting, and reviewing changes. It is primarily concerned with transitioning new initiatives and procedural adjustments from development processes into operations. This means standardizing methods and procedures to ensure efficient handling of changes while also minimizing potential disruptions to service quality.
On the other hand, release management is specifically concerned with the flow of changes through pre-production environments and their successful deployment into the production IT environment. It involves everything from configuration management to release and deployment management. A large part of release management is coordinating release activities across different environments. The goal is ultimately to group changes into "releases," based on defined common characteristics, to create a proactive and predictable change management process that manages the volume of interdependent changes within a company.
Essentially, change management focuses on authorizing changes to controlled environments, while release management focuses on managing the transition and deployment of software releases to ensure minimal disruption. Both processes are crucial for maintaining system stability and service quality within an organization.
Release management also provides a valuable service within the DevOps methodology. As with Agile, DevOps’ automation and decentralization may appear to make release management obsolete. But despite what DevOps provides in terms of fast deployment and simultaneous product development, there will always be a need to coordinate relevant teams, align business priorities, standardize processes, and ensure high-quality products.
Coordinating with DevOps managers, release managers should monitor continuous integration and ensure that positive customer value is being improved, bugs and other issues are being quickly and effectively addressed, and that new features are integrating correctly into the established release management process.
As separate project teams each introduce changes to the production environment, they must be able to coordinate effectively. Release management strives to align these teams with unified processes, policies, and guidelines for every stage of the release. The purpose is to ensure that everyone involved is fully aware of what resources are available, how these resources are being used, what changes are being made by which teams, and that any subsequent changes follow a prescribed, standardized sequence of tasks. This sequence is called the release management process.
As you move through the release management process, you will encounter six essential steps, detailed below.
The very first step in release management is recognizing the need for new product features or changes to established functions or services. Change requests go through predetermined channels, and are evaluated based on need, feasibility, cost, and other criteria. It is worth noting that not every one of your change requests will receive approval; those that do move onward into the planning stage.
The planning stage includes creating and setting up the release management system. As such, setting aside more time for this stage will likely be necessary.
In this stage, the business defines the structure that the release will take. A precisely defined structure will give your team a roadmap to follow as they move through subsequent steps and push the release through to deployment and beyond. Your release plan can be as simple as a checklist, detailing actions and tasks to be completed in their chronological order, as well as teams or individuals responsible for each. That said, many businesses find that detailed digital workflows provide the clearest direction, ensuring that everyone is working towards common goals and that essential requirements are being met.
Effective release plans usually include milestones, responsibilities, estimated timelines, deadlines, and a clear, comprehensive view of the project as a whole. Teams can refer to the release plan throughout the process. Establishing a repeatable release management system usable across multiple releases allows you to speed up future processes and better coordinate efforts, companywide.
With approval, ideation, and planning behind you, you now enter actual development. Designing and building the product, component, or function requires addressing any issues that may arise, and converting your project’s established requirements into software. This stage overlaps somewhat with the next stage.
Throughout the designing-and-building stage, the in-progress product should be sent through a real-world testing environment. As the various functional and non-functional tests uncover problems and bugs in the software, the release is sent back for revision. Most releases will go through multiple iterations, moving back and forth between stages in an iterative process until the release is certified for final review.
Throughout the designing-and-building stage, the in-progress product should be sent through a real-world testing environment. As the various functional and non-functional tests uncover problems and bugs in the software, the release is sent back for revision. Most releases will go through multiple iterations, moving back and forth between stages in an iterative process until the release is certified for final review.
With final approval from the project owner, the product is sent into production and can be released to the end user. Any supplementary educational material, including change notifications, operating guides, and necessary training resources will need to be released at the same time. Be sure to tailor these resources not only to the end user, but also to any company-side support teams that may need to field user questions or assist in troubleshooting.
The deployment stage represents the culmination of the release management process, but the process does not end at launch. Teams will need to follow up to assess the release, identify any bottlenecks or hurdles, and improve the process for future products.
Be aware that businesses of various sizes may follow a very similar end-to-end process, with essentially the same steps. However, smaller organizations with fewer projects may find that their version of the release management process is much less complex when compared to larger businesses. As a company scales its releases to match its growth, and as teams and departments expand to include more people, release management expands as well, requiring more advanced support tools.
Effective release management offers numerous benefits that are essential for efficient software development and release. From efficiency to risk mitigation, organizations that utilize effective release management can expect streamlined processes for a competitive edge in the market.
Release management, when done right, boosts the number of successful releases and reduces quality problems. This leads to improved software quality and customer satisfaction.
The process improves productivity, communication, and coordination among teams, enabling faster software delivery while reducing risks associated with deployments.
By repeatedly producing quality software and streamlining processes, businesses can shorten their time to market, allowing them to respond more effectively to evolving needs and stay competitive.
As release management helps standardize and streamline development, it also implements auditable release controls and creates a repository for all releases. This standardization increases organizational maturity and allows teams to learn from past experiences and apply lessons to future releases.
Operations departments benefit from increased coordination with developers, leading to fewer surprises during releases and better resolution of configuration issues between development and operating environments. This collaboration breaks down team barriers and improves product delivery.
Overall, effective release management not only ensures successful releases and high-quality software but also promotes productivity, communication, and collaboration across IT functions. Each of these benefits enhances product delivery and customer satisfaction.
Release management plays a pivotal role in the software engineering process, ensuring that software is built, tested, and delivered according to company requirements. It acts as the glue that integrates various tasks such as design, development, testing, deployment, maintenance, and meeting business and customer needs.
The process starts by combining business imperatives with technical tasks like quality assurance and compliance within a central repository. This repository houses software artifacts and manages their release to client production environments for application deployment. In essence, release management ensures that customers receive the software they need, when they need it, all while maintaining quality and compliance standards.
A key aspect of release management is its adaptability to distinct types of software releases, whether they involve new designs or modifications to existing software. The actual release can be manual or automated, depending on the maturity of the release management process. Automation has become increasingly common, offering faster deployment cycles and enhanced efficiency.
Releases can take various forms, including physical products, downloads, mobile app updates, or web-based application updates. Regardless of the form, release management encompasses not only technical aspects but also supporting business activities like training, marketing, and customer support coordination.
Release management is essential for all software engineering groups across industries, enabling smoother processes, shorter time-to-market, improved customer satisfaction, and the ability to adapt to evolving business needs. It aligns with modern development approaches like DevOps, emphasizing collaboration between development and operations to streamline software delivery and enhance overall product quality.
Release management plays a key role in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Also referred to as release and deployment management, it is one of the main processes under the Service Transition section of ITIL. Release management in ITIL focuses on quality and customer experience as primary to product and service deployment, while also promoting cost-effective business practices. In ITIL terms, release management addresses changes and improvements to existing products or services.
ITIL represents perhaps the most trusted and widely-used framework for technology governance. In this framework, release management ensures development and operation teams can coordinate, sharing relevant knowledge and resources. This helps teams effectively conduct multiple projects at the same time, providing a structured approach for ideating, employing, testing, and introducing new versions of components or services.
ServiceNow Digital Product Release (DPR) makes the most of the ServiceNow AI Platform to integrate with numerous data sources and then build workflows and automation using that data to drive efficiency and optimization. For releasing software products, the planning, development, and deployment entails the use of numerous tools and ServiceNow is unique in the way that it can integrate with all those tools and combine that information with what we already know about a product in ServiceNow. With that information, DPR enables data-driven validation of release readiness – drastically reducing the manual release checks of the past and making it easier to scale software delivery.
DPR is an included component of IT Service Management Professional or Enterprise, to extend your management of product value streams.
With DPR, you have a dedicated release management solution that will enable you to:
Provide central IT with end-to-end visibility into release readiness across products being delivered
Leverage release policies and fit-for-purpose release templates to automate validation of release readiness
Empower product teams to know when they are ready to release and how their work is measured
Simplify cumbersome release and change processes, accelerating both processes
DPR provides visibility and the ‘definition of done’, integrated with change and DevOps processes, prior to handing over to 3rd party release deployment products.