Agile, DevOps, continuous distribution — surely we can automate away the need for release management? However, accelerating the development of software alone does not give an enterprise a competitive advantage.
An automated delivery pipeline and independent teams do not remove the need for big picture alignment and a holistic approach to development and delivery efficiency. Without effective release management, organizations are at risk of wasteful development pipelines, underutilized resources, and prioritizing delivery of low-impact features.
The release manager marries the outside deployed code and inside user stories perspective, ensuring the efficient prioritization of work in every sprint. However, digital transformations must ultimately result in increased value delivery to customers. Release management teams understand the business needs resulting from customer feedback, and can translate that into actionable development plans. DevOps leads to faster time to market, but does not eliminate the business risks associated with product development.
Faster deployment to production environments must be supported by rigorous risk awareness and risk management. Release managers are ideally placed to audit the process and standardize governance policies and requirements. Only a standardized, repeatable risk management process can be scaled to the enterprise level.
The steps of the release management process will be similar regardless of company size, but there will be many differences in the details. This is relatively simple to plan, build, test, deploy and review. Release managers can keep track of the release status and any scheduling using simple tools and applications.
As company complexity grows, its releases grow commensurably in size and scope. A large enterprise release can have multiple interdependent value streams. Scheduling must be coordinated between dozens of people, resources and testing environments without impacting other concurrent releases.
Governance requirements increase and are more complicated to comply with. There are two components of the release management process. One is setting up a release management system, and the other is following through with that system. The most basic way to manage releases relies on a checklist.
This can be enough for very small teams and simple applications but does not scale with increased release complexity. Effective release management relies on a repeatable system that is difficult or impossible to circumvent. As a business scales, release management must scale too. Enterprise-class software development requires enterprise-class tools.
Once the right tools and systems are in place, the release management process should be second-nature, and integrated into the application lifecycle. Clarify business needs. The very first step in any release should be a clear user story that outlines the benefits to end-users. Release planning. Each feature or application should go through a release planning phase before development begins. Regardless, it is still a new offering your customers will anticipate. And internal teams must accommodate for the release requirements within their schedule of other planned work if they are to assist your efforts.
The actual dates of engagement may have less precision as far as committed targets for an agile team. However, a general delivery plan even in an agile framework will continue to establish trust and expectation in your product with your customers and teams.
Depending on your organization, releases may happen monthly, weekly, or even continuously. Standardizing the process minimizes ambiguity across the team, improves velocity, and allows you to introduce automation — freeing up the team to focus on the highest value work.
Take into account the team's velocity on the previous release or general capacity to deliver so you can create a general scope, sequencing, and timeline for the release. During release planning, a general benchmark on the number of sprints or iterations to deliver the scope should be achieved. The accuracy of this expectation and plan depends on whether the team's capacity is well-known as well as the level of detail or grooming the scope has been through during estimation.
Revisit plans after each iteration. Tracking an external release target quarterly or monthly, for instance can be helpful. It builds trust with your customers and can be refined as your plan progresses. Establish a launch or release template that will be the "gold standard" for every major delivery.
Use this template to engage the greater team, who may be supporting multiple products in the portfolio only when needed. A standard for launch also sets expectations for when these teams will be needed internally. Set a standardized status at both the release and feature level to indicate the overall health of the plan. Status indicators provide an "Are we good?
A release status enables communication to your internal stakeholders, while feature status workflows enable granular visibility into the readiness of the feature and its current status with respect to development, staging, or QA environments. Regardless of whether your release plan is executed in sprints or via more waterfall methodologies , regular check-ins and adjustments to the plan are necessary.
Use your sprint closure to adjust plans as needed, or schedule regular reviews to ensure plans are on track.
Start planning better releases today. And if you want to transform the way your team brings new features to market — from ideation and prioritization through definition and delivery — try Aha! Roadmaps free for 30 days. Product management Release management Overview. Introduction to release management Every release is a gift. What is a product release? A typical release management process includes the following phases: Strategy review Aligns the team around your goals and initiatives — keeping everyone focused on the "why" behind the work.
Release definition Determines the focus or scope of what you will deliver. Backlog review Identifies features from the features backlog that fit within the defined release theme and support your goals. Feature definition and prioritization Defines a prioritized set of features and requirements that will be included in the release.
Design Includes customer journey mapping, prototyping , and visual design. Development Includes development work required to build key features — most likely in a series of sprints. Launch planning Outlines the cross-functional work needed to promote the release and support customer adoption. Testing, QA, and release preparation Ensures that the new functionality works as expected — or is sent back to development to fix. Marketing activities Includes any activities that marketing is responsible for — such as email campaigns, blog posts, and social media.
Sales and support documentation and training Provides resources like release notes, how-to guides, and support videos to help customer-facing teams communicate the value of the release. Go-to-market launch Releases code into production and brings the new functionality to market.
Roadmaps Effective releases require collaboration and transparency throughout the entire process. Why plan releases? An example of a features roadmap in Aha! Roadmaps How do you standardize the release process? Phased communication and supporting team engagement Establish a launch or release template that will be the "gold standard" for every major delivery.
Repeatable stages to readiness Set a standardized status at both the release and feature level to indicate the overall health of the plan. Forward adjustment on plan Regardless of whether your release plan is executed in sprints or via more waterfall methodologies , regular check-ins and adjustments to the plan are necessary. Product management. Home Blogs Bits N Tricks. These numbers signify : 1. Major 2. Minor 3. Build and 4.
Revision number of the software. Lets explore these individually. Major number is generally incremented in case of either one or more of the above points. This means that major releases can cause change aversion. They may require you to provide training to your customers, or dedicated time for migrating data to the new version.
They may also mean issues or changes with compatibility. For instance, a major release may not be backwards-compatible with older hardware and legacy programs. The second of the software release types is the minor release. That is, they edit the current version of the software.
Minor software releases are smaller than their major counterpart. They are not a total overhaul or a new version of your software offering. Rather, they enhance and improve existing functions.
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