Release Management Process is a critical process that decides the fate of your software applications.
Any minute mistakes or drawbacks along the software release management process can lead to unhappy users and ultimately the rejection of the particular feature or your entire software.
That’s why various companies have started investing in implementing agile components to this essential and delicate enterprise process.
Want to implement the same within your organisation? Wait! The key to the successful implementation of agile in your release management is understanding the significant elements of the process.
Let’s talk about that.
Before we begin, it is recommended to hire professional services with substantial experience in release management and IT service portfolio management.
What Is Release Management?
In simple words, the release management process involves management, strategising, scheduling, and monitoring the entire software build through every phase and IT environment, including rigorous testing and deploying software releases.
IT systems, resources, and application development processes are gradually becoming increasingly intricate, making complexity and specialisation inevitable.
How Does The Release Management Process Work?
The release management process comprises of the following categories or workflows:
- Approved Change- Finalising the changes or updates that need to be incorporated into the software.
- Release Planning- Planing the entire release process, assigning tasks and allocating resources.
- Release Building- The actual software development process involves building the codebase for new features and updates. This is an iterative process.
- User Acceptance Testing- The updated features are tested through a user feedback mechanism.
- Release Preparation- The updated software is prepared for release to the end-users. Release and Deployment- The final release when the updated software with the new features are released to the end-users. Additionally, the deployment events are noted and discussed, and the pointers for the subsequent releases are noted.
What Challenges Does The Professional Release Management Solve?
Professional release management services solve various challenges that a release manager can face during the release process, including:
- Inadequate visibility into every stakeholders’ work
- Governance, monitoring and regulation (i.e. were all quality measures appropriately implemented?)
- Ensuring every essential step and guidelines were followed to design the desired result (i.e. did I follow the appropriate steps to develop what the customer asked for?)
Without adequate risk management associated with these challenges, a release manager may sabotage their release management process.
How To Strategize Your Release Management Process For Better Agility?
Standardising Governance
Irrespective of the type of IT business practice you’re planning to improve, the first place that you should begin is with standardising its governance.
With standardisation implementing automation becomes easy. Automated processes not just reduce human errors but also reduce the time, cost and resource requirement.
Consistent Monitoring And Reporting
One of the most crucial aspects of agile is consistent monitoring of a project and creating reports about its progress.
An agile project is categorised into sprints. Each of these sprints requires at least one objective (sometimes it might have two or more). By the end of a sprint, any progress needs to be judged against those objectives.
Requirements Traceability
Requirements traceability involves a systematic linkage that enables you and your teams to follow their fulfilment and validation of business requirements.
