Release management orchestrates the planning, scheduling, and control of software releases from development to deployment. With growing complexity and innovation demands, organizations need to master their release management to meet deadlines and satisfy user needs (while maintaining quality).
Below, we'll walk you through everything you need to know to build an effective modern-day software release management process.
Why Software Release Planning Matters
Release management covers everything from initial ideation to final release for a software project. Its purpose is to create a repeatable process that can handle the four primary areas of the software development lifecycle:
- Development
- Testing
- Releases
- Updates
Done effectively, release planning can achieve the following:
- Increase release frequency
- Reduce bottlenecks in the workflow
- Shorten feedback loops
- Limit unplanned work
- Reduce defects and production incidents
- Allow teams to add value with features and updates
How Does Release Management Work?
Release management keeps the software development process in line with expectations. This process can significantly vary depending on the industry involved, the desired functionality, the software requirements, and other external factors.
For example, software developed for highly-regulated industries—like aviation and medical devices—undergoes multiple rounds of rigorous testing and requires the creation of extensive documentation. Functional requirements and quality assurance processes are equally thorough, necessitating several layers of approval before the product can be released.
On the other hand, startups dealing with web or mobile applications will likely have less rigorous requirements around documentation, testing, and verification, allowing them to be more agile.
A disciplined release management process tailored to a given industry’s tolerances and requirements will help ensure that projects meet the expectations of both stakeholders and users. The goal is to ensure that the software does what it was intended to do and that it’s ready to be scheduled.
In general, the release management flow is fairly straightforward:
- Change request and approval
- Release planning and design
- Release building
- Acceptance testing
- Release preparation
- Release and deployment
Release Management in an Agile World
Today, most organizations base their software development practices on some version of the agile development principles. In essence, the agile approach aims to create code that is ready for deployment at any time; this is achieved through the use of continuous delivery (CD).
The agile approach drastically changes the need for the conventional stages of integration and testing, and it shortens the release process by automating most of those tasks. In continuous delivery, the release management process is critical in verifying the integrity of the code and making sure it functions as planned.
Effective agile release management requires the following:
- Automation: to remove bottlenecks and shorten the build cycle
- DevOps mindset: to improve coordination between the teams and stakeholders involved in a release
- Continuous integration: to provide stringent automated tests of the software and ensure correct operation
Decoupling Releases and Deployments to Mitigate Downtime
Modern release management decouples releases from deployments to reduce downtime and minimize risks associated with software updates. Decoupling releases from deployments means separating the act of making new code or features available in production (deployment) from the act of making these features visible or accessible to users (release).
This allows for:
- Reduced Downtime: Deploying code without immediately activating it helps you avoid maintenance windows or service interruptions.
- Lower Risk: If issues are discovered post-deployment, you can easily disable the new features without rolling back the entire deployment.
- Gradual Rollouts: You can release new features to a small subset of users first and monitor for issues before a full release.
- A/B Testing: Decoupling allows for easier implementation of A/B tests in production environments.
The primary tool for implementing this strategy is feature flags. Feature flags let developers turn features on or off without deploying new code. Here's how it works:
- Deploy code with new features behind feature flags (turned off).
- Verify the deployment hasn't caused any issues.
- Gradually turn on features for select users or user groups.
- Monitor performance and user feedback.
- Adjust or rollback if necessary, or proceed with full release if all is well.
How to Implement Decoupling
The primary tool for implementing this strategy is feature flags (also known as feature toggles). Feature flags allow developers to turn features on or off without deploying new code. Here's how it works:
- Deploy code with new features behind feature flags (turned off).
- Verify the deployment hasn't caused any issues.
- Gradually turn on features for select users or user groups.
- Monitor performance and user feedback.
- Adjust or rollback if necessary, or proceed with full release if all is well.
By adopting this approach, organizations can significantly reduce the risks associated with new releases and minimize potential downtime, leading to a more stable and reliable release process.
How to Build a Release Management Process
Here are the steps required to define and implement a release management process in your organization.
What Are the Objectives?
As with any new process, it’s important to start with clearly defined goals. Most organizations will benefit from one or more of these objectives:
1. Mitigate risk throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC)
2. Align all teams involved in the release
3. Streamline the development and release processes
4. Meet deadlines consistently
5. Align development goals with business goals
These goals might seem broad, but the idea is to remove barriers across multiple groups within the organization, ensuring alignment and coordination. By defining and standardizing the process and governance around release management, you help teams strive for better quality and faster shipping.
In addition, automation and clearly defined acceptance criteria prevent the bottlenecks of manual testing and increase the end product’s quality.
What Are the Steps?
The release process varies by organization. Most will include at least the following five steps. These steps align best with a feature management platform like LaunchDarkly:
1. Release Requirement Planning
Starting with a clear set of requirements and understanding what the release is meant to address are vital steps for building a good release management process. While this planning stage is likely to be the most time-consuming, it is also the foundation on which you create a release from start to finish.
The important thing to capture in this step is the overall workflow for staging a release and each team member’s role. At a minimum, a release plan should include the following:
- Requirements
- Expected delivery dates
- General timeline
- Overall scope of the project
- Success criteria (performance indicators and metrics)
The level of detail and rigor for this part of the process will depend on the organization’s needs. At its core, the release plan should answer the question of what: What are we building? What is the objective of this release? What is the value to the business and end users?
2. Testing and Acceptance Criteria
Based on the requirements and the initial plan you created, you need to define a set of testable use cases and standards. The goal is to validate that the release functions correctly and ensure all requirements are being met.
In most agile methodologies, this part of the process will be automated as part of the CD pipeline and will involve one or more of the following:
- End-to-end testing
- Unit testing
- Integration testing
- Chaos engineering
3. Software Testing in Production
Traditionally, developers would push their code to a staging or testing environment that closely replicates the real production environment as part of the SDLC.
A more reliable and less risky alternative for testing releases directly in production is dark launching. This allows you to release features to a small group of real users before the final release.
The best way to implement dark launching is through feature flags, which allow you to enable or disable functionality without the need to release code.
4. Iteration and Refinement
Monitor the success criteria defined as part of the planning stage to decide whether the tested feature should be rolled out to a wider audience or whether it needs further refinement; at this point, you return to the planning stage.
5. End User Release
This is the final stage of the process. Once your stakeholders and/or the quality assurance (QA) team have signed off on the feature, you can make the release available to the entire userbase.
Conclusion
The needs and steps involved will vary by organization, but having a solid release management process will greatly simplify your development workflow and allow you to define the best approach to suit your needs.
It is worth mentioning that the terms release and deployment are often used interchangeably; however, by leveraging LaunchDarkly’s feature flagging capabilities, you can decouple the release aspect from shipping the code to a production environment.
This decoupling of deployments from releases increases developer productivity and gives organizations and release managers finer control over the release process. For example, it enables release strategies like the following:
- Canary releases
- Targeted releases
- Percentage-based releases
- Entitlement releases
To implement these strategies, you can use LaunchDarkly to get total control over your code so you can ship quickly and reduce risk. Its targeting capabilities, clean UI, real-time control, and enhanced security give you an end-to-end solution that optimizes your release management strategy and leads to a higher-quality product for stronger releases.
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