Release Management

The release management process is a relatively new but rapidly growing discipline within software engineering of managing software releases. As software systems, software development processes, and resources become more distributed, they invariably become more specialized and complex. Furthermore, software products (especially web applications) are typically in an ongoing cycle of development, testing, and release. Add to this an evolution and growing complexity of the platforms on which these systems run, and it becomes clear there are a lot of moving pieces that must fit together seamlessly to guarantee the success and long-term value of a product or project.The need therefore exists for dedicated resources to oversee the integration and flow of development, testing, deployment, and support of these systems. Although project managers have done this in the past, they generally are more concerned with high-level, "grand design" aspects of a project or application, and so often do not have time to oversee some of the more technical or day-to-day aspects. Release managers (aka "RMs") address this need. They must have a general knowledge of every aspect of the software development process, various applicable operating systems and software application or platforms, as well as various business functions and perspectives.

A release manager is:

• Facilitator: serves as a liaison between varying business units to guarantee smooth and timely delivery of software products or updates.
• Gatekeeper: “holds the keys” to production systems/applications and takes responsibility for their implementations.
• Architect: helps to identify, create and/or implement processes or products to efficiently manage the release of code.
• Server application support engineer: help troubleshoot problems with an application (although not typically at a code level).
• Coordinator: utilized to coordinate disparate source trees, projects, teams and components.

Some of the challenges facing a software release manager include the management of:

• Software defects
• Issues
• Risks
• Software change requests
• New development requests (additional features and functions)
• Deployment and packaging
• New development tasks