In today’s fast-paced digital environment, business owners and project managers must start planning updates and new features as soon as first version of their software product hits the market. However, ensuring that your new version rolls out without any bumps is critical to survival. Why? Bugs, slow load time and other glitches lead to frustrated users.
It’s estimated that by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. Protecting the integrity of your live environment while rolling out important new features and products must be a top priority if you don’t want to lose customers during the roll out process. Release management is a strategy that focuses on meeting this challenge. Here’s what you need to know about this key business function.
What is Release Management?
Generally speaking, management of releases outlines the systematic process of building new and updating software products. In the IT world, release management strategy guides all stages of a software release, from planning and development to testing and deployment. Whether you are rolling out IT services, products or updates, this is a process that helps you effectively manage the project. Think of release management as a business function that supports change. It enables your business to grow while protecting existing systems, and most importantly the customer experience.
Release management creates a more efficient process, resulting in shorter times to market and fewer quality problems. Ultimately, that means your company can be more responsive to market changes and consumer preferences by increasing the number of successful releases. By mitigating risk, effectively managing releases ensures the customer experience remains consistent throughout the roll out process.
Role of release management
Release management makes sure that software updates are distributed in a controlled, helpful, and consistent manner. It connects the development, operations, and business teams to streamline the code-to-production pipeline. A precise release process reduces risk, shortens delay, and improves product quality.
- Release management oversees the planning, scheduling, and smooth deployment of software releases.
- It brings together cross-functional teams to promote seamless collaboration and break down operational silos.
- The Release Management process follows a specific structure to ensure that each release is consistent, accurate, and controlled.
- A dedicated release manager handles execution, anticipates the deadlines, and resolves any issues that arise.
- Release management software uses automation to track progress and optimise workflows.
- Release management best practices help organisations strike the ideal balance between reliability and speed.
Ultimately, release management is important for reducing time-to-value and providing updates that keep customers satisfied.
Benefits of release management
Release management adds structure and control to software delivery, helping teams reduce risks, maintain quality, and make changes faster. It also tracks efforts across development, testing, and operations to ensure more consistent and timely releases. The following are a few key benefits:
- Improved Planning and Visibility: Teams get a clear roadmap for upcoming releases, which reduces last-minute surprises.
- Reduced Downtime and Failures: Thorough testing and staging lead to more stable deployments and fewer post-release issues.
- Faster Time-to-Market: It helps to streamline processes to speed up delivery while maintaining high standards.
- Better Collaboration: Cross-functional teams work together to enhance trust and communication.
- Continuous Improvement: Post-release analysis aids in improving techniques and subsequent release management processes.
Effective release management processes and tools enable teams to consistently deliver value, keep pace, and remain competitive.
Project management vs. Release management
If you are thinking release management sounds a lot like project management, you’re right. They are both essential to a successful product roll out. However, they each play their own vital role.
Project management
focuses on planning and coordinating resources to successfully launch a major product or release. It helps a team manage cost and time, as well as ensure quality.
Release management
is also concerned with a successful launch. However, it focuses more on coordinating different test & production environments and the IT environment to deploy a product in the least disruptive manner. In short, it aims to protect the integrity of your live environment, ensuring that connected products and services stay functional throughout the roll out. Release management creates a proactive and predictable environment for IT changes to take place, moving projects from development to production environments where they are consumed by end-users. Making that process seamless is the primary objective.
Collaboration Between Teams for Effective Delivery
Depending on team sizes & depth of complexity, management of releases is handled by either a specialised team or with the help of existing project team.
Change management vs. Release management
Although they have different functions, change management and release management are closely related and significant to the productive and secure delivery of software.
Change Management
It works by reviewing and approving proposed changes to ensure they are necessary, safe, and beneficial. It supervises decision-making in order to reduce risk and disruption to the business. Change management is concerned with what needs to change and why, with a focus on executive oversight, impact analysis, and approvals.
Release Management
Once a change has been approved, it takes over and focuses on how and when it will be implemented. It involves the controlled, low-risk planning, coordinating, and enforcement of changes across platforms. Release management makes sure that the rollout is reliable, consistent, and causes the least amount of problems to systems and users.
Working Together for Smooth Deployments
In many industries, change and release management teams collaborate to align priorities, timelines, and risk mitigation strategies. Effective collaboration, whether with specialists or cross-functional teams, is required to ensure that approved changes are delivered to customers on time and securely.
What is the Release management process?
The release management process can be viewed as a meticulously planned journey from idea to impact. It all starts with thorough planning and determining what needs to change and when. The development and testing environments are designed to offer a smooth workflow.
The goal is to ensure a simple and low-risk deployment to production. However, this is not the end. After each release, teams evaluate, review, and improve the process. This ongoing cycle changes software chaos into predictable, timely, and high-quality results that users can rely on.
Release Management process best practices
According to research firm EMA, 75 percent of negative IT incidents are the result of changes in software and the environment. “Without a solid release management system, you put your entire infrastructure at risk,” explained their experts. Follow these five steps to draft your process.
The planning phase
It is the most important and should take the most time. Start by outlining standards and requirements. Why is the product being released? What consumer pain points does it address? Create a workflow that includes timelines, delivery dates and requirements, as well as the overall scope of the project. You can craft your plan according to what works best for your team. You can plan incremental releases of a product using agile release planning. For example, you may opt for a checklist that outlines processes and responsibilities in chronological order. Another option is to create a cloud-based flowchart that contains the same information in a more visual format. Once this phase is complete (convey the upcoming changes via release notes preview and), get feedback from all stakeholders and make needed adjustments.
The building stage
It puts your plan into action. Note that the product will bounce between steps two and three. As it’s developed, it is sent to the testing phase. As bugs are identified, it goes back to the building stage for tweaking.
Real-world testing
It is critical to the release management process. User acceptance testing (UAT) allows end users to provide feedback. This is often accomplished by offering a free beta trial to a group of users.
A final quality assurance
The review is performed to ensure all standards and requirements outlined during the planning phase have been met. Data gathered through UAT is double-checked to confirm the bugs have been fixed and tweaks have been implemented.
Deployment
It has finally arrived. A key part of releasing a product is messaging. End users, whether they are employees or customers, must be notified and educated about the new features. Send out release notes or change logs to them. Does the release require instructions or training to operate? This is especially important for users that depend on the software to do their jobs or manage their businesses. Effective software deployment is critical for new and existing apps and platforms. By leveraging some software release management tools you can manage the process of software release and delivery.
Conclusion
Release management experience is now a requirement for competitiveness and it’s not a choice for you anymore. When implemented correctly, it improves speed, stability, and customer satisfaction. However, many teams fall behind due to ineffective communication and manual processes.
That’s why smart teams should use the Automated Release Notes and Reports app for Jira to streamline their workflows and automate release communications. It also maintains the focus on creating highly effective software.
Make sure your releases are impactful, consistent, and stress-free. Start using the Automated Release Notes and Reports app today to make each release count!
FAQs
What tools are commonly used for release management?
Jira, GitHub, Azure DevOps, Jenkins, and the Automated Release Notes and Reports apps for Jira are popular tools used for release management. These tools streamline planning, approvals, deployments, and documentation, ensuring that each release runs smoothly, is trackable, and is stress-free.
Who is responsible for release management in a team?
Typically, Release Managers take the lead, but DevOps engineers, QA leads, and product managers also play important roles. It’s a team sport with coordination as the MVP.
How does release management fit into agile or DevOps workflows?
Release management acts as a conductor, combining code, testing, and deployment into a unified symphony. It ensures that stability is not compromised by speed in Agile and DevOps.
What are the common challenges in release management?
Miscommunication, last-minute changes, failed deployments, and a lack of automation all have the potential to derail releases. The biggest challenge? Maintaining your cool while balancing speed and accuracy.
Release communication forms a small but important part of release management. Our app for Jira Automated Release Notes, does this for you seamlessly.
