The Latest

In this article Brad Appleton delves into the realm of build status accounting to discuss various build promotion models and how to choose an appropriate and effective implementation of a build promotion lifecycle.

The first thing that comes to mind about release management is how frequently releases are made and their levels, i.e. full release or patches. A common understanding of Release Management is that it is the management of introducing controlled items into a production (live) environment. But in reality release management is much more than this. “Release management is the process of planning, building, testing and deploying hardware and software, the version control and storage of software.” (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, release management, Retrieved from http://www.becta.org.uk/tsas/index.cfm?refsect=ntss&bcsect=default§=release&id=tt5281 ) release management is not just what goes into production but also how something goes into production. It is the complete management of your production environment.

This article addresses detailed scenarios and the associated problems with the build process. We look at the usually activities and work patterns of a developer and relate those to build practices.

I'll keep this one short. If you have a change that has been made to a file (or even to a change package of files) somewhere in the past and you would like to eliminate that change from the past, you can do so with a judicious use of almost any merge tool.

Cars and Clocks
In previous chapters I have mentioned the concept of a repository, but I haven't said much further about it. In this chapter, I want to provide a lot more detail. Please bear with me as I spend a little time talking about how an SCM tool works "under the hood." I am doing this because an SCM tool is more like a car than a clock.

CM is complex enough without having to worry about managing releases! Release management, however, isn't just part of CM, it should be driving your CM solution.

Release management deals with defining, using and managing the set of deliverables (the Build), for all of your customers. This includes the creation of records to subsequently identify release contents, the creation of variant builds, patch releases, incremental releases, and the support of parallel streams of releases (older product releases, current release(s) and future releases). It also deals with the ability to know what’s in a release and to compare one release (e.g. one being sent to a customer) to another (e.g. the one the customer currently has so that the customer is well aware of the changes being made to his environment and how they match up against his requirements). In an end-to-end product management environment, release management spans the entire spectrum from requirements management through to product retirement.