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wide variety of configuration management and application lifecycle
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Release Management - May 2008
The release management process is essential to the success of any software or systems development effort. Agile practices, frameworks such as ITIL v3 and a number of ISO/IEEE/EIA standards provide guidance on how to do release management effectively. Joe Farah blazes our trail by introducing us to the Next Generation of Release Management. While Steve Berczuk, Robert Cowham and Brad Appleton discuss an Agile Approach to Release Management. Mario Moreira also considers how Release Management can help Agile Teams. Ben Weatherall discusses Release Management’s place within the CM Universe and Chaim Kirshen discusses a Release Manager’s best practices. Austin Hastings gives us Dimensions of SCM Challenges #4 followed by SCM Techniques #4 – Longacre Deployment Management & Project Baseline. Pablo Santos considers SCM Essentials for small teams and, in Behaviorally Speaking, I discuss the people, process and technology challenges that I have experienced in creating effective release management systems. If you want to know the most effective ways to setup your release management practices then please join us for this issue of CM Crossroads and, as always, send us your personal challenges so that we can all create excellence together!
Bob Aiello
Editor-in-Chief
CM Journal
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Behaviorally Speaking - Release Management
Release Management involves the build, packaging and deployment of systems. Most of my work has involved building applications software in NYC financial services firms. Release management can also involve systems software including patches to operating systems and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software. The financial services world can get pretty exciting with many frequent releases of complex (e.g. Java/SOA) software with build and runtime dependencies changing on a constant basis. Taming the...
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CM: THE NEXT GENERATION of Release Management
We build software as part of a
system or as its own ,entire product.
The goal is to meet the requirements established by the Customer, the
Market and/or the Cost/Benefits analysis.
Product releases are meant to move us from some starting point to our
ultimate product over a period of time:
months, years or even decades.
Release Management starts, not with the delivery of software, but with
the identification of what we're planning to put into the product. Th...
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An Agile Approach to Release Management
Teams practicing Agile
Software Development value working software over other artifacts. A
feature from the release plan is not complete until you can demonstrate
it to your customer, ideally in a shippable state. Agile teams strive
to have a working system ("potentially shippable") ready at the end of
each iteration. Thus Release Management should be easy for an ideal
agile team, as agile teams, in theory, are ready to release at regular
intervals, and the release management as...
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 | How Release Management can help Agile Teams
As many have
learned, using Agile methods can provide solid business benefits including
earlier return on investment, earlier detection of failed efforts, and more
satisfied stakeholders. However, when
applying Agile methods to product-lines (and projects therein), often there are
dependencies on other products (and their projects), services, and
organizations that may run in a more waterfall or hierarchical manner. If
the Agile project and product therein are self-sustaining ...
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 | Release Management
In order to see Release Management's place within the CM
universe, inspect figure 1 below. Release Management is one of two construction
phases, with the other being Build Management and, although not immediately
obvious, it is tied to the two production phases (Deployment and Site
Management).
...
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 | Release Engineering Best Practices
Good build teams know that stewarding the production build
process, is only the beginning the of job.
The real question is what happens after
a build is done. How are builds
tracked? How do you track what was
released? How do you escrow your
environment?
...
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 | Dimensions of SCM Challenge #4 - Schedule & Technological Diversity
Part of managing software development is dealing with the
challenges that arise. Delivering software requires overcoming the challenges,
or at least mitigating the attendant risks during the development activity.
Generally, organizations work with a constant level of challenge. When one
challenge is overcome, the organization will take on a new challenge. For
example, when a project releases software that overcomes a technical challenge,
it might then schedule a new release with a challeng...
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 | SCM Techniques #4 - Longacre Deployment Management & Project Baseline
Patterns are a well-understood concept in software
development. Thanks to Steve Berczuk and Brad Appleton, they are a part of the
SCM vocabulary as well. So far, the SCM pattern vocabulary is relatively
low-level, concentrated on describing repository layout, branching strategy and
the like. The techniques discussed here are not patterns-they don't have the
required structure, and don't provide prescriptive formulas for implementation.
Instead, these are discrete, recognizable methods of s...
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 | SCM Essentials for Small Teams
Very small teams think that SCM (Software Configuration
Management) is not for them. Even the name sounds like a big thing: CM, configuration management. "Why should I care?" They
say.
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