What is release management?

Stable and resilient software runs the modern world. But let’s face it, bad releases happen all the time, and even tech giants aren’t immune to it. The infamous Crowdstrike Falcon Agent update caused the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death), affecting 8.5 million devices on July 19, 2024. Airlines halted. Manufacturing and transportation were disrupted. An estimated loss of $5.4 billion was reported from the Fortune 500 alone. This is why delivering software updates reliably, efficiently, and without disruption is a critical discipline. Release management forms the backbone of this discipline, enabling organizations to balance speed to market and stability.
In this post, we’ll discuss what release management is, its importance, and the associated process.

Release management is the set of practices used by development teams to plan, schedule, coordinate, and deploy software releases across environments, from development all the way to production

What is release management?

Release management is the set of practices used by development teams to plan, schedule, coordinate, and deploy software releases across environments, from development all the way to production. The objective is to deliver new features, bug fixes, and updates promptly, without disruption and with minimal risk.

Why is release management important?

Today, multiple DevOps teams work simultaneously to develop and ship updates to the same product. Every commit needs to be synced, and every subsequent release needs to be communicated, coordinated, and executed seamlessly to prevent disruption. Imagine your company is working on a new fitness app. One of the dev teams creates a new weight-tracking feature. But before the code can be pushed to production, they need to build, test, and deploy the code in multiple environments. Other dev teams and site reliability teams need to be kept in the loop to avoid conflicting code deployments and instability in software.

This is where release management helps:

• Reduces downtimes and risk: Structured and well-coordinated releases help minimize deployment failures and rollbacks. This contributes to high software uptimes that consumers enjoy despite the high velocity of deployments made.
• Improves compliance: Proper release management enables logging and audit tracking that help fulfill regulatory requirements such as GDPR and SOC2.
• Faster time to market: Reliable, standardized, and continuous deliveries help dev teams to ship features faster.

The importance is summed up by Jez Humble and David Farley in their book Continuous Delivery: “Releasing software is too often an art; it should be an engineering discipline.”

A brief history

Earlier, release management relied on manual deployments that had a waterfall-based approach. However, the process was slow, cumbersome, and error-prone. The demand for accelerated software delivery triggered the industry to adopt a more Agile and DevOps-centric approach. A report by Compuware found that 97% of IT teams are under pressure to deliver accelerated software and innovation.

Today, software releases are automated and rely on a data-driven, continuous delivery approach. In the present day, CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment) releases happen faster than ever, sometimes even several times per day.

Release management processes have been refined over the years, and the exact processes and tools can vary between organizations and teams

Release management process

At this point, you might be wondering: What are the key stages involved in the release management process? Release management processes have been refined over the years, and the exact processes and tools can vary between organizations and teams. However, the key stages are detailed below.

Stage I: Planning

During the planning phase, dev teams will work together with other stakeholders and decide:

• What features or fixes will be included in the release? Such as: “Agoda adds a real-time currency conversion based on spot FX during checkout.”
• Dependencies on other modules or systems, such as: “Is the source data API ready and formatted according to the requirement?”
• Potential hazards, along with the specific strategies to mitigate these risks, such as: “Netflix plans a video codec update and assesses if it will disrupt streaming across devices.”
• Schedule in terms of the release dates and timelines.
• Any business continuity plans (workarounds) or rollback strategies, such as: “If our order processing software goes down, we will use a manual register to track and process orders.”
• Definition of done and success metrics, such as: “Achieve release with zero downtime.”
• Roles and responsibilities (developers, testers, operations).

The dev teams will typically work with the business to coordinate any downtime and potential impact. A well-thought-out release plan is iterative and reduces negative impact on the business.

Stage II: Building

Here, the goal is to package all of the code, associated configurations, and dependencies into a deployable unit. Development teams will:

• Write and commit the code: Developers will convert functional requirements into technical requirements and code.
• Document records for all modifications done and maintain version control: Ensuring an audit log is important to be able to trace back any errors and for successive teams to understand the codebase on what was changed and why.

Stage III: Testing

Testing is a crucial part of release management. This is where we determine if the resulting codebase is working as expected and deployment-ready. A variety of tests are undertaken as part of this stage:

• Functional testing: Ensure that the intended functions are working properly.
• Regression testing: Check if the new changes have caused any negative impact on the previously existing functionality.
• Performance testing: See if the software can bear the expected loads.
• Security testing: Identify any vulnerabilities and patch them before moving to production.
• User acceptance testing: Verify that the intended changes meet business requirements. (Typically done by a key user from the business.)
• E2E testing: Business and dev teams work together to ensure that all modules are working end-to-end. Products like qTest can help accelerate the process and release faster.

Many teams often underestimate the time taken for testing. Depending on the complexity and scope of changes, an appropriate time should be allocated in order to do a quality job.

Stage IV: Deployment

This is the last stage, where once the business and product teams sign off, the release is moved to production. The product is essentially released to the end user. Documentation and user guides are provided. Any training needed is delivered. The activities are coordinated with the operations team, and after a hypercare period, any further operational issues are onus of the operations teams. Main tasks include:

• Verifying that the production environment is configured correctly and ready to host the release.
• Executing deployment scripts and pipelines.
• Coordinating with relevant teams and end users.
• Monitoring for any post-deployment issues.

Whether a change was successful or not can only be determined once it is released. Michael T. Nygard mentions this in his book, Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software: “Release is the beginning of the software’s true life; everything before that release is gestation. Either systems grow over time, adapting to their changing environment, or they decay until their costs outweigh their benefits and then die.”

A release manager is the person tasked with planning, coordinating, and optimizing the release life cycle

What is a release manager?

As mentioned earlier, release management methodology has come a long way and evolved into an intricate practice. This has given birth to a new role: release manager. But what’s the role of a release manager? A release manager is the person tasked with planning, coordinating, and optimizing the release life cycle.

Again, the responsibilities might vary from team to team and between organizations, but generally, a release manager is responsible for:

• Scheduling and managing a product’s release calendar
• Collaborating with business, operations, product, and development teams
• Leading GO/NO-GO decisions at various milestones
• Ensuring that each release complies with business requirements, policies, and is compliant
• Gathering feedback based on reviews from the business after the release is done

Since the release manager needs to work across domains and teams, the assigned individual should have strong cross-functional knowledge, leadership, communication skills, and risk management skills.

Some might confuse the role of a project manager and a release manager. However, both have distinct roles. A project manager leads the entire life cycle of a project and is involved in the end-to-end planning, budgeting, and execution. They are responsible for the project from planning to closure. Release managers, on the other hand, are limited to the specific release process only. Both roles work closely together for the delivery of a successful product/service.

Best practices for release management

Certain guidelines can help you create an effective release management plan:

• Standardization: Develop standards that are compliant with your company’s policy and adequate for your product’s tech landscape. This helps maintain consistency across releases, making sure that all the processes are repeatable.
• Automation: Use appropriate toolchains to automate builds, testing, deployments, and validations.
• Collaboration: Cross-team collaboration is vital to executing an effective release management process. Use tools like Confluence to document releases, Slack for quick communications, and Jira for tracking and managing end-to-end tests. This helps avoid silos and improve visibility.
• Continuous delivery (CD): CD pipelines help ensure your releases are safely and quickly deployed to production.
• Continuous improvement: The release manager should lead a continuous improvement mindset. Capturing what went wrong, ways to avoid it, and baking it into the standards. As a by-product, the user experience should be enhanced for all those involved.

Challenges in release management

Insufficient planning or bad practices can plague your release management process with challenges.

Insufficient planning

A release might fail if the plan and associated resources are not well thought out. The vulnerabilities can pop up in various forms:

The testers’ availability wasn’t fully aligned, and the test window was missed.
The environment was set up but had to be patched at the last minute, rendering the environment useless during the release process, so the release had to be stopped.
The testing timing was supposed to be for three days, but eventually ended up being two weeks due to several bugs.

Poor documentation

Teams need to spend more time on future releases if they don’t do a good enough job of documenting their prior releases. Knowledge not documented is lost knowledge. People come and go. Toolchains change and evolve with time. Hence, it’s important to document the entire process in a robust repository.

The last thing a development team should be doing is creating a release, only for business to come back and tell them that it’s unacceptable

Unclear requirements

Requirements for the success criteria should be detailed and clearly documented. The last thing a development team should be doing is creating a release, only for business to come back and tell them that it’s unacceptable.

Conclusion

Release management as a practice is likely to continue evolving further. Today, it’s a necessity for software success. When development teams get it right, they’re able to improve user experience, decrease downtime, release more quickly, and drive more business success.

From here on, the importance of release management will only grow as more businesses will require faster releases and stable software for billions of people. As a result, we will need even better release management tools. We can expect the future to see even greater automation, closer DevOps integrations, and toolchains involving AI.

Visit the Tricentis website to learn more about release management.

Ali Mannan Tirmizi wrote this post. Ali is a senior DevOps manager and specializes in SaaS copywriting. He holds a degree in electrical engineering and physics and has held several leadership positions in the manufacturing IT, DevOps, and social impact domains.