What are the benefits of release management?
To answer this, we need to understand how releases work. We need to understand how the various stages work together to form a complete picture.
To accomplish this, we need to have physical and virtual environments to process and deploy releases. These two areas are often complementary, but not always.
Physical environments are the environments we use to prototype features and get our hands dirty during the design process. Virtual environments are used to test features and get our hands dirty during the production cycle.
Because this is a journey, most of us will find ourselves using release management more often during the development cycle than during the production one. This is okay; we don’t want to derail the process by introducing disruptions during the testing or the release process.
The main benefit of release management is that it
This is the stage where we get to see implementation in the real world and get to hear feedback from end-users as to whether or not changes have been made or not.
We know that when we introduce better automated test methods to the process, the quality of the feedback increases significantly. The end goal is that we will deliver continuous delivery to all our customers, regardless of if they are first-time customers, existing customers, or members of resellers.
Another benefit of release management is that we can incorporate the latest release changes as part of the deployment process. This allows us to ensure that we don’t over-commit to a project and to avoid release delays.
This is where we get to hear from the end-user about the status of the release. We can use this information to decide whether to continue development, move to a more incremental schedule, or simply stop development and revert to the last deployable version.
We know that when we introduce better automated test methods to the process, the quality of the feedback increases significantly.
