Release Management in the DevOps Space

Now that the era of Devops is gaining momentum, the boundaries of Agile, ITIL, ITSM, BRM are thinning to bring together Development and Operations.A Release now is not just loading a big packet of code into production after years of planning coding and repeating.

We have moved to more agile perspective of releasing after every iteration. According to the agile principles the goal is that we have a "Ship Ready" and "Working Software" at any point in time.

So how does Release Management fit in with DevOps?

While the Development and Operations start working with the common goal of providing shippable codes after every iteration, the role of a release manager becomes important. This role sometimes is played by the product owner. Large organizations have their very own release management team. This Team/Person acts as a catalyst for the integration of Dev and Ops, thus leading to what we call Continuous Integration.

The Work Flow of Release Management in DevOps

The Release Management starts with the Release Planning. Like every project the requirements of the the release may not be clear upfront.Also the infrastructure, resources, people (Devops doesn't prefer to call people as resources :-) ) may not be ready.

Thus managing a Release using DevOps is the best practice to follow.The end of every iteration will give a clear idea to release manager of how to move further. Release Manager will also get an idea of what releases should be planned at which pace to reach the "Ship Ready" goal.

While we may think that Release Manager works with a single release at any point of time, this may not be true.There can be multiple releases across projects which can be tracked with various tools used by Release Managers like JIRA.

Release Management and the tools

While Release Management may look like more of managing the releases, it also requires Building and Deployment of code continuously.That is in line with the principles of Devops which means that the "Ship Ready" code is the responsibility of every member of the team.

Thus Release management requires understanding of various continuous integration/deployment tools like Hudson, Jenkins, Ant, Maven.Knowledge of JIRA/Remedy for tracking issues, tasks, creating user stories, keeping release notes, rollback guidelines makes release management a lot more smooth.

This is a vast subject and above is a piece of my understanding of Release Management in DevOps, however I have rarely come across Release Management as a part of DevOps. Release Management should be a focal point of Devops for creating and delivering successful products and partnerships.