Release Management

I always recommend to teams newly transitioning to agile that they keep every iteration the same length. This helps them learn to manage their time, and after a few iterations they'll start to get a rhythm. Hopefully, they'll learn to work incrementally, doing testing and coding concurrently as part of one development effort, so that user stories are finished throughout the iteration, and testing isn't pushed to the last day.

A continuous build may be a great idea, but it takes more than a great idea to be successful. In this article, Tony Sweets describes his personal experience with difficult build servers and his organization's move toward a continuous build.

Companies that develop multiple products often struggle with how to ensure they all work together as a solution and struggle with how to get the deliverables from various products together into a working release. Project managers and product managers have other priorities to handle. So who handles a release that wrangles together multiple project deliverables from multiple products that define a solution or complex release? The answer is the Release Manager.

This article includes some of the material that Geoff Thorpe presented at a BCS CMSG event where he discussed the control of applications using change management, release management,
and configuration management techniques. He discusses applications control from a hardware and software perspective.