The ultimate guide to release management process

Is your application frequently running into bug concerns? Is your customer engagement decreasing due to
poor app performance and increased downtime?
You may need to reconsider your release management process.
Half-baked releases are a huge “NO” when it comes to releasing your software, especially in a fast-paced,
ever-evolving IT business.
75% of performance issues arise due to updates in software or change in its environment.
To reduce expensive delays and improve the organisational workflow, you should invest in strategic
release management and DataOps solutions.

Understanding Release Management
If your organisation is vested in developing applications and updating software features, you’re already
familiar with the concept of release management. And you understand the importance of an efficient
release management process.
Release management is the bridge that connects all the stages encompassing a software release from
codebase creation, functionality testing to deployment.
Release management plays a role every time new software is launched, or existing application updates
are requested.
While the release management process may differ and needs customisation depending upon the
organisational requirements, there are five fundamental components of release management.

5 Phases Of The Release Management Process
The Planning Release
Planning is the most extensive, time-consuming phase. In this phase, you require to create a structure of
your software development process from inception to delivery.
An efficient release management plan will enable your teams to remain on track and ensure quality
standards and client requirements are adequately fulfilled.
A release plan can be strategised through various techniques. One of the most common release
management approaches is SDLC or systems development life cycle.
The SDLC technique enables software developers to plan, create, monitor, and update software
application systems with a greater level of efficacy and quality.
You can implement SDLC alone or in association with any other project management processes.

In this stage, develop a streamlined workflow that you monitor and your team can follow during the entire
release management process.
The workflow should elaborate on how the entire release is staged and the roles and responsibilities of
each team member. Your release plan needs to mention the following:
● Significant timelines associated with the project
● Delivery dates
● Client requirements (required feature updates or any other changes)
● The overall project scope
You can use various ways to chalk out your plan and specify the process.
● Release management checklist technique: The checklist must highlight the functions of various
processes and the roles and responsibilities in approximate chronological order.
● Release workflow creation technique: Utilise intuitive flowchart, colour codings and other visual
elements to assign timelines, roles, and tasks.

Also Read: How Successful Release Management Process Works?
Building Phase
Once the release plan is finalised, your team can begin the building and development phase. The building
phase involves the actual creation of the application or software product. Throughout the building phase,
you need to adhere to the requirements specified in the release plan.
Once all the concerns and feature updates are incorporated, the build needs to be subjected to real-world
scenario testing.
This may involve numerable iterations. As the team creates the application features, it is sent (usually
automatically) to the test IT environment for user acceptance testing. This enables the team to detect any
bugs or concerns that may come up in the real-world scenario.
As bugs are detected, the erroneous build is moved back for development at stage two. With an iterative
release management process, the workflow may keep shifting from phase two to three until the release
meets acceptance criteria and receives a green signal.

User Acceptance Testing
Have you seen certain software features mentioning the word “beta” or “beta testing”? That’s what UAT or
user acceptance testing is.
UAT involves getting feedback from the application end-users. For organisational software meant for
internal use, the software update is shared with the larger group in the enterprise to gather feedback.
Beta testing involves giving access to the software to a restricted number of real users for feedback
purposes.
This is a critical stage of the release management process since the amount of collected data and
required changes to fulfil user demands determine the official launch timeline.
As discussed previously, this is an iterative process. As issues are detected, the team goes back to the
development phase to fix the concerns and redesign the features for better integrity.
The developed software or the updated features needs to clear the UAT phase before moving into final
implementation and release.

Prepare Release
This step involves incorporating the final changes and touches to the application, considering input from
the UAT. A final quality review is also done in this phase of the release management process by the QA
team.
During the quality check, the QA performs final examinations to ensure the build quality is aligned with the
minimum acceptable quality standards and business demands highlighted in the release plan.
Although both UAT and quality assurance can’t always forecast or detect every scenario that might occur
after the launch, these phases churn out the most common concerns to prevent any complexities during
the launch.
After QA review and validation, the release gets pushed for deployment. You’ll need approval from the
product owner before releasing it in the live environment.

Deployment Phase
Finally, after days of hard work and painstaking effort, your product is ready for release into the live
production environment.
The deployment phase serves two purposes:
● Sending the developed or updated software into production,
● Training and education about the new product to the end-users for efficient use.
● Discussion about the deployment.
For example, your users should receive a notification about the update and how to utilise the new
functionality within your software application. If you’ve incorporated some significant changes in the
functionality, you may need to offer robust and ongoing training for seamless usage.

Such training is primarily applicable for internal software releases. The employees need an understanding
of the software functionality for proper usage and improved productivity.
Finally, the development team should perform an assessment of the release performance and discuss the
deployment events.
Any lingering concerns should be identified and documented for addressing in the next release.

The ultimate guide to release management process

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