Release management: How to not get it wrong

To be on the same page, the release management process usually covers how software releases are planned, designed, and deployed. This includes code handover from devs to QA (and back if needed), testing, potential DevOps release management activities, and actual deployment.

If you’re interested, you can also watch a video where we go into detail on when it is time to formalise a release management lifecycle.

What is release management?

Release management is the combination of planning, scheduling, coordinating, and deploying software releases or updates. For effective release management, you should carefully oversee each stage of the release lifecycle, from initial planning and development to testing, approval, and final deployment. Your primary goal is to ensure software updates are delivered smoothly, on time, and with minimal disruption to users or operations. 

Ultimately, release management best practices streamline the delivery of software updates, enhancing the overall efficiency and effectiveness of software development processes.

Release management process: step-by-step guide

If you have never done release management, the concept might sound overwhelming. But just as it is with almost every process, planning and breaking it down into smaller steps will greatly ease it. So here is the step-by-step process of completing the release management: 

1. Planning: 

• Define Objectives: Clearly outline the goals of the upcoming release. What features need to be added or fixed? What are the priorities? 
• Set Timelines: Establish deadlines for each stage of the release process, from development to deployment. 
• Manage Resources: Determine the team members responsible for each task and ensure they have the necessary resources and support. 

2. Development: 

• Coding: Developers write the code based on the requirements outlined in the planning phase. 
• Version Control: Use version control systems like Git to manage changes and collaborate effectively. 
• Code Reviews: Encourage peer code reviews to ensure code quality and identify potential issues early on. 

3. Testing: 

• Create Test Plan: Develop test cases based on user stories and acceptance criteria defined in the planning phase. 
• Execute Tests: Testers run various tests, including functional, regression, and performance testing, to uncover bugs and ensure the software functions as expected.
• Bug Tracking: Use issue tracking systems like aqua cloud or Jira to log and prioritise identified issues.

Let’s continue with our list.

4. Review and Approval: 

• Stakeholder Review: Share the release candidate with stakeholders for feedback and validation. 
• Quality Assurance: Ensure that the release meets quality standards and complies with relevant policies and regulations. 
• Obtain Approval: Obtain approval from relevant stakeholders before proceeding to deployment. 

5. Deployment: 

• Using Release Management Tools: Utilise release management tools like Jenkins or Azure DevOps to automate deployment processes. 
• Create a Rollout Strategy: Decide on a deployment strategy, such as phased rollout or canary releases, to minimise risk and disruptions. 
• Backout Plan: Have a contingency plan in place in case issues arise during deployment, including rollback procedures if necessary. 

6. Monitoring: 

• Monitoring Tools: Use tools like Prometheus or New Relic to track system performance and user behaviour post-release. 
• Alerting: Set up alerts to notify the team of any anomalies or critical issues requiring immediate attention. 
• Incident Response: Establish protocols for addressing and resolving incidents promptly to minimise impact on users. 

7. Feedback and Improvement: 

• User Feedback: Gather feedback from users through surveys, feedback forms, or direct communication channels. 
• Retrospectives: Conduct post-release retrospectives with the team to reflect on what went well, what didn’t, and areas for improvement. 
• Iterate: Use insights from user feedback and retrospectives to iterate and improve future release processes.

Follow this step-by-step approach in your process and you will maximise the benefits of release management.

What is release lifecycle management?

You can also come across the term release lifecycle management. What does it even mean?

Well, release lifecycle management is the systematic approach of overseeing and managing the various stages of developing, deploying, and maintaining software releases or updates throughout their entire lifecycle. This encompasses planning, development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and feedback collection. The goal of release lifecycle management is to ensure that software releases are delivered efficiently, meet quality standards, and align with organisational objectives. It involves coordinating efforts among different teams and stakeholders to streamline the release process and maximise user value while minimising risks and disruptions.

Change management and release management: key differences

You can also hear the terms change management and release management being used interchangeably, but there are some major differences: 

1. Scope and Focus: 

• Change Management: Change management primarily deals with managing changes to the organisation’s processes, systems, or services. It focuses on assessing, authorising, implementing, and reviewing changes to minimise disruption and maximise benefits. 
• Release Management: Release management, on the other hand, specifically focuses on managing the deployment of software releases or updates. It encompasses activities related to planning, scheduling, coordinating, and deploying software changes to ensure smooth transitions and minimal disruption to users. 

2. Timing and Frequency: 

• Change Management: Changes managed in change management can be ongoing and occur at any time, depending on organisational needs and requirements. Changes can range from minor adjustments to major overhauls. 
• Release Management: Release management involves coordinating planned software releases at scheduled intervals. Releases typically occur at predetermined times, such as during regular update cycles or in response to specific business needs or market demands. 

3. Granularity and Complexity: 

• Change Management: Change management often deals with a broad range of organisational, process, and system changes. Changes can vary significantly in scope, complexity, and impact, requiring thorough assessment, planning, and coordination. 
• Release Management: Release management focuses specifically on managing the deployment of software releases or updates. While software changes can also vary in complexity, release management typically deals with changes related to software development, testing, and deployment processes. 

4. Stakeholder Involvement: 

• Change Management: Change management involves engaging various stakeholders, including business leaders, project managers, IT teams, and end users, to assess the impact of changes and obtain buy-in. 
• Release Management: Release management requires collaboration between development teams, quality assurance teams, project managers, and stakeholders to plan, coordinate, and deploy software releases effectively. While stakeholders are involved, the focus is primarily on managing the technical aspects of software deployment. 

In summary, change management deals with managing changes across organisational processes, systems, or services, while release management specifically focuses on managing the deployment of software releases or updates.

Responsibilities of a release manager

As mentioned before, release managers are crucial to handling the release management activities. Here is what the release manager should do in detail: 

1. Planning Releases: The release manager should collaborate with stakeholders to determine the timing and content of software releases, ensuring alignment with business objectives and customer requirements. 
2. Release Coordination: The manager should oversee the entire release process, ensuring that all tasks are completed efficiently and according to schedule to minimise delays and disruptions. 
3. Risk Management: It’s up to the manager to identify and mitigate potential risks and dependencies associated with software releases to maintain stability and minimise the impact of unforeseen issues. 
4. Communication: The manager should facilitate clear and effective communication among cross-functional teams, stakeholders, and users to ensure that everyone is informed and aligned throughout the release process. 
5. Quality Management: The release manager has to work closely with QA teams to ensure that software releases meet established quality standards through thorough testing and validation. 
6. Deployment Management: The manager should coordinate the deployment of software releases, ensuring smooth transitions and minimal disruption to users, systems, and operations. 
7. Documentation: Documentation responsibilities also fall onto the manager’s shoulders, as he should maintain accurate documentation of release plans, processes, and outcomes to ensure transparency, accountability, and consistency throughout the release process. 
8. Continuous Improvement: The manager must identify opportunities to improve release management processes and practices, incorporating feedback and lessons from previous releases to drive continuous improvement. 
9. Stakeholder Engagement: The manager has to engage with stakeholders to gather feedback, address concerns, and incorporate requirements into release plans to ensure that releases meet stakeholder expectations.
10. Training and Support: The manager should provide training and support to team members involved in the release process to ensure that they have the necessary skills, knowledge, and resources to carry out their responsibilities effectively.

Of course, depending on the company, these responsibilities might change, but the core objective remains consistent: to ensure the successful planning, coordination, and deployment of software releases in alignment with organizational goals and standards.

Even if you don’t have to meet some regulatory requirements, there are a number of reasons to formalise your release management lifecycle. 

• Release control brings improved stability and reliability. Most companies already use a test case management tool and even have some issue prioritisation in mind. Both company and employees, however, would benefit from a formal checklist that they can tick off.
• Controlled feature rollout is a somewhat recent advantage that makes a big difference for actively supported products. You may want to see what the first 10% off users think of new functionality before going through with it. You could have a feature that needs some polish, but you can’t or won’t release another update just to enable it. Proper release management brings modularity to enable certain functionality later.
• Release history is a great asset even if your company is not required to have one. It simplifies potential internal audits, provides the data to improve your software development, and gives the means to quickly identify malicious or negligent updates
• Security is a major consideration for implementing release control. You can natively enforce not just QA checks, but manual code sign-offs. The reason why you don’t really see sabotage within big software companies is simple: someone catches potentially hazardous code.
• Meeting the timeline is easier with Agile release management if your company follows the Agile methodology. Release control imposes genuine milestones that the team has to meet so a new build is released on time.

On-demand releases are better known as continuous deployment. They decouple patches and even feature updates from the traditional weekly/monthly cycles. We at aqua cloud recently adopted this approach to great success. 

Here are just some reasons to adopt on-demand releases:

• Faster releases suit changing business environments. From Pokemon GO to Tinder, a lot of geolocation-based, interaction-focused services had to pivot when the pandemic hit. Even an extra week of waiting would have caused a major revenue hit as countries started to lock down at around the same time.
• Business experiments are easier to do if you can update the software whenever you want. YouTube recently tried paywalling 4K playback for a small portion of users, but Google walked back upon the first whiff of community outrage.
• Bottleneck reduction is arguably the biggest advantage of on-demand releases. Completed features are not waiting for weeks/months to be released. Business analysts and the product team are not idling before they see initial feedback and can quickly get onto a second iteration of a certain feature.
• Quality baseline goes up as well. Even if you have a skeleton crew in vacation season tackling an unforeseen issue, continuous delivery ensures a good level of automated testing and proper release protocol. It also brings simplified rollback in case a new release made the issue even worse or broke something else.

Here are a few tips for introducing and maintaining good release management. Other companies learnt from their mistakes so you don’t have to.

• Set a release schedule or reject it. The setup of your release management will somewhat vary if you use unconstrained continuous delivery relative to Agile-dictated cycles or even a Waterfall release plan. 
• Adopt version control software. Release management is greatly simplified if you’re using a tool that keeps track of changes to the code repository. GIt and git-derivative solutions are proven options for companies that can use Cloud or must stick to On-Premise software only.
• Maintain different environments to minimise disruption. If you are not employing continuous delivery, it is still important to observe how your code behaves before deploying it. Deploy to one or multiple test environments and a staging environment (stage) before you go into production. The more costly a potential service disruption is, the more effort you should put into making the stage as close to production as possible.
• Add metrics and triggers. Intelligent release management can utilise incident monitoring software (e.g. Splunk) to stop gradual rollout or revert the update due to a critical issue. This data will also help with the larger effort of measuring QA effectiveness via metrics. 

Modern software development has also moved on from a single release manager that is responsible for every build. Here’s what engineer-turned-CEO Bob Davis had to say a few months ago:

The three main arguments for automation are quality, speed, and extra functionality. Manual release management takes time to implement and can still go wrong due to the human factor. Adopting automation solves these problems and also gives you extra opportunities, such as gradual rollout, automated rollback, and integrated testing.

Automated release management works best when powered by an Application Lifecycle Management solution. Such tools help you coordinate all release management software and also tie QA & dev issue trackers into the release management routine. If release management is your primary need, our advice is to pick an ALM that has a well-documented REST API to connect any tool. 

Biggest challenges of release management 

The biggest challenges of release management often revolve around balancing the need for speed and innovation with stability and reliability. Some key challenges include:

1. Coordination and Communication: 

• Challenge: Coordinating the efforts of multiple teams, departments, and stakeholders is complex and stressful. Ensuring everyone is on the same page regarding release schedules, dependencies, and expectations requires effective communication and collaboration. 
• Impact: Poor coordination and communication can lead to misunderstandings, delays, and conflicts, resulting in inefficient release cycles and missed deadlines. 

2. Risk Management: 

• Challenge: Identifying and dealing with risks associated with releases, such as bugs, compatibility issues, and security vulnerabilities, is crucial to ensuring system stability and reliability. However, anticipating and addressing all potential risks is challenging, especially in dynamic and complex environments. 
• Impact: Failure to effectively manage risks results in system failures, security breaches, downtime, and reputational damage, leading to financial losses and loss of customer trust. 

3. Quality Management: 

• Challenge: Ensuring the quality of software releases through thorough testing and validation is critical to minimise the likelihood of bugs, defects, and regressions impacting users. However, conducting comprehensive testing across different environments and scenarios requires significant time, effort, and resources. 
• Impact: Inadequate testing or rushed releases can result in poor user experiences, increased support requests, and damage to the organisation’s reputation, leading to decreased customer satisfaction and retention. 

4. Deployment Complexity: 

• Challenge: Managing the complexity of deployment processes, especially in environments with distributed systems, microservices architecture, or hybrid cloud infrastructure, can be daunting. Coordinating the deployment of multiple components while minimising downtime and ensuring zero or minimal impact on users requires careful planning and execution. 
• Impact: Deployment failures, downtime, and service disruptions can result in lost revenue, productivity losses, and damage to the organisation’s brand and reputation, affecting customer trust and loyalty. 

Best release management tools

There are several excellent release management tools available, each offering unique features and benefits. Some of the best release management tools include: 

1. Jenkins is an open-source automation server that supports software project continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). It offers a vast ecosystem of plugins for building, deploying, and automating software releases across various platforms and environments. 
2. GitLab is a comprehensive DevOps platform that includes features for version control, CI/CD, code review, issue tracking, and release management. It provides an integrated solution for managing the entire software development lifecycle, from planning to deployment. 
3. CircleCI is a cloud-based CI/CD platform that automates the software delivery process, including building, testing, and deploying applications. It offers powerful features for orchestrating workflows, integrating with popular version control systems, and managing releases. 
4. GitHub Actions: GitHub Actions is a CI/CD and automation platform built into GitHub. It enables developers to automate workflows directly within their repositories. It offers a wide range of pre-built actions and integrations, making it easy to build, test, and deploy software releases.

But we want to give you more than just a release management tool. Its name is aqua cloud.