What Is Release Management?

Release management process involves software deployment operations and change initiatives. It functions to-

● Schedule both internal and external tasks relevant to software deployment

● Allocate human and physical resources to complete the tasks

● Oversee the operation and execution process

Roles And Responsibilities Of A Release Manager

The responsibility of a release manager include

● Understanding the business requirements and setting priorities accordingly.

● Determining the circumstances under which the priorities need to be altered.

● Collaborating with cross-functional teams including business leaders, IT project teams, operations staff and product owners to make sure each release contains accurate features.

● Altering the release scope or re-prioritising features according to the input from project portfolio managers.

● Scheduling the release unit dependencies into release packages.

● Understanding each team’s bandwidth and capacity involved in development.

● Knowledge of the resources and environments available for testing.

● Scheduling testing based on team and resource availability.

● Creating software release plans, which includes governance and approval requirements.

● Ensuring new releases are compliant with governance requirements.

● Streamlining and ensuring smooth release deployments.

Release manager utilises various release management tools to provide reports, create release plans, adjust release plans and ensure compliance.

What Exactly Release Management Entails?

Automation has indeed made software development and delivery a seamless process. However, accelerated delivery doesn’t mean your enterprise will get an edge over your competitors.

Efficient delivery, good alignment to governance and a holistic approach to delivery are the only solutions for having a competitive advantage.

Therefore without efficient release management, enterprises are at risk of underutilized resources, wasteful development pipelines, etc.

Delivering Value To Customers

The ultimate aim of digital transformation is to deliver value to customers. The release management process involves a comprehensive understanding of the business requirements from client feedback and converting them into actionable features or development plans.

Also Read : How IT Enterprise Solutions Can Be Helpful For Your Business?

Rigorous Risk Management

DevOps accelerate the time to market, but it doesn’t completely eradicate the risks associated with the development process. Release managers perform rigorous risk assessment through audits, standardising governance policies and ensuring compliance.

Enterprise release management tools can be utilised to detect discrepancies or violated governance policies and eliminate them.

Enhancing Development Efficiencies

The effective release management process aims to improve the following three metrics-

● Clients need to receive more positive values like bug fixes and novel features

● Reduction or complete elimination of negative value during delivery like downtime and bugs.

● The clients need to receive net value faster.

Role Of Enterprise Release Management Tools

Any software development cycle starts with a unique business requirement and ends with final deployment and end-user adoption. Enterprise release management tools aim to provide end-to-end visibility to the entire process.

It helps release managers to-

● Identify bottlenecks

● Monitor cross-functional team collaboration

● Troubleshoot any potential team collisions

● Extract relevant information trapped in data silos and disparate application across the organization

● Enforce release management policies.

With so many release management tools in the market, you need to identify the features which would work best for your company’s requirements. In general, a good release management tool needs to have the following qualities-

● Eliminate unnecessary complexity

● Makes the entire software process visible

● Create and enact release strategies

● Assess and manage risks

● Automatically updates real-time data

● Tracks project history and compliance fulfilment

● Integrates with other SDLC tools

Release management drives continuous improvements in the software development and delivery process. Release managers and tools function in unity for an effective release management process.