In the past, I had a window view of the Boston Harbor from my office. I could see boats coming in an out, including numerous tour boats, whale watch boats, and sail boats. Occasionally, I got the chance to see the large ships including the tankers, battleships, tall ships (e.g., elegant large sailing ships), and the rare site of an aircraft carrier. The aircraft carrier is a floating runway for jets. Imagine the infrastructure needed to get those incredibly fast jets ready and flying.

Most CM professionals, I think, would agree that the CM database is not just another component of Application Life-Cycle (ALC) management, it's really at the heart of the matter. I'd like to say that the CM function shares the same stature - it's not just another component of your ALC management - it's the nerve. In fact, I'd like to go one step further and say that the integration of CM and Data Management (DM) capabilities, when done properly, can transform your ALC management environment into a next generation engine that will empower each component of your environment.

Release management is an awesome responsibility that plays a vital role in the success of a software development project. Releasing is often considered to be an activity that happens near the end of the process—a necessary evil, perhaps, but no more.

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.