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.