Everyone wants to deliver great software. But designing great software is no easy task. You need to consider several components. Release schedules, bug resolution, user testing, development workflows, resource allocation, IT management tools— the list is very long. For large and complex projects requiring ongoing feature releases, For large complex projects with ongoing feature releases, teams need well-structured and streamlined processes in place to help ensure the efficiency and quality are not compromised. Only then can the product stay true to the commitment of providing great business value. This is where release management comes in. Release management in the DevSecOps environment combines development, operations, and security. This guide will focus on DevSecOps best practices that can help your teams consistently deliver quality software. What Is the IT Release Management Process? In the IT operations realm, release management represents a combination of workflows and processes to develop, test, release, and deploy software to its end users. This includes everything from planning, codebase development, testing, and all the way up to deployment/release of the software. An efficient IT management tool is necessary during release management. Release management empowers production with systemic management to handle a seemingly complex software delivery life cycle. Release management provides production teams with an efficient system for managing what could sometimes be a daunting software delivery lifecycle. Additionally, a good system of release management in the DevSecOps environment must ensure an optimal experience for the customers and align with overall business priorities. The fundamental objectives of release management include:
The 4 Best Practices For IT Release Management When it comes to the release management process, a single approach is never the answer. Every enterprise has unique requirements, and therefore the release management process should be tailored to meet your specific requirements. However, there are ground principles applied to almost every organisation venturing into software development. Introduce measurable standards for defining success Subjective feedbacks are ineffective for measuring the success of your release management strategy. Instead, establish quantitative key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be easily tracked and measured. It can be error rates, the number of downloads, or downtime duration. Defining a quantitative standard for success ensures all of your team members remain on the same page. Implement dark launch Ready to roll out your new feature in the market? Wait! Hold back! Did you try dark launching? Rolling out the updated feature to a massive user in a single go can be risky. One small glitch can ruin all the hard work and innovation you’ve put into the product. Dark launching enables you to test new features on 1% (or a smaller percentage) of your users instead of 100%. Dark launching can reduce the risk in three ways:
Automation, when implemented in the appropriate way, minimises human errors and gives your team the freedom to spend more time developing innovations for high-impact projects. You can set a reminder or opt for an automated progressive launch with the right IT management tool. Ensure tracking metrics early You can never see improvement in your release process if you don’t measure. Ensure setting up monitoring to track your application’s performance before, during, and after the release. These metrics can include load time, uptime, downtime, error rate, downtime, conversions, etc. ConclusionDevSecOps processes embed security early in the release management phase. This ensures that glitches are detected in the early stages and that addressing the bugs is easier and cheaper.
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Software projects require funding, support, nurturing, as well as a lot of effort and attention to be successful. The need for software release management is growing as more companies switch to Agile software development techniques. When your programme is produced, it will be successfully delivered to the users who wish to utilise it, thanks to a good release management plan. Why do you need release management? Release management is necessary for businesses to ensure that no one ruins the launch or update of a product. If they do, release management will make it simpler to identify and address the problem immediately. The benefits of release management are:
Pain Points of the Release Management Process
5 Tips For A Successful Release Management Process 1.Analyse the current release management state Without knowing what something is, how it works, and where the problem is, you can't start fixing it. Creating a thorough understanding of the present release process is the first step toward enhancing the release management system. Start with a series of walk-through meetings with important players in the software development process. Also Read: 7 Proven Ways To Implement DevSecOps In Your Existing Workflow 2.Keep your goals solid and realistic Your team must recognise when a process under development is crucial in order for them to comprehend that they must give it their all. Each team member should enter a release management process aware of their responsibilities and when they are due to fulfil them. It is simpler for everyone involved to complete the process properly and more quickly if the importance of the project is made obvious and everyone is aware of their responsibilities and the timeframe they must adhere to. 3.Focus on release infrastructure Your release infrastructure consists of all the elements required to deploy and make the product accessible to users. Not only must you create excellent software, but also make it accessible to the client so they can use it. Finding out what has to be in place before the engineering team has finished creating the product is essential to establishing a successful release process. The storage, hardware, software licences, bandwidth, user profiles, network connections, and access rights are all included in the release infrastructure. The release infrastructure also includes human resources expertise. 4.Standardise and automate The more process components you can automate, the less your staff will need to conduct time-consuming and duplicate work. The steps in a particular process can be easily learned by team members thanks to standardised processes, which also help to clear up any confusion. Automation increases productivity, lowers the possibility of error, and frees up team members to work on more crucial projects. Plus, making sure processes are well-standardised can help to ensure consistency. To generate, test, deploy, monitor, and manage data across the systems development lifecycle, the DataOps platform employs a variety of automated technologies frequently referred to as "toolchains." 5.Develop a regular release cycle It is crucial to have a cycle for launching new projects or processes that are predictable and where all parties concerned are familiar to the procedure. Regularly managing processes can make the rollout easier and keep everyone on schedule. People have many opportunities to talk, work together, and still stay on task for the process release when there is a regular release cycle. Additionally, it establishes a schedule and routine for everyone to adhere to and gives your consumers or clients the assurance that the process will be designed and implemented on time. Your release cycle needs to be as precise as you can make it, not just some arbitrary number you concocted at lunch. Plus, you should also try it out before you release it. Conclusion Effective release management requires perseverance, hard work, and excellent communication. When attempting to enhance your release management process, using best practices, a well-developed release management plan, and reliable tools will help ensure that new development and rollout take less time and function more efficiently. In the past few years, we have seen a rapid rise in digitalisation and automation. The importance of DevOps has also grown a lot as businesses run on the path to digital transformation. However, security has been a concern in the DevOps community, but a robust DevSecOps environment can be the solution. DevOps brings together development and operations to improve the efficiency, speed, and security of software development & delivery. DevOps is useful for quick software delivery, improving customer happiness, shortening time-to-market, and creating a good organisational culture. The DevOps approaches have become important for the majority of businesses, and thus their popularity is growing rapidly. DevOps helps to meet the changing needs of the corporate environment. It is evolving to meet the rapid evolution of cutting-edge technology. Today, DevOps reflects a shift in IT culture's thinking. DevOps focuses on incremental development and quick software delivery based on Agile, lean principles, and systems theory. DevOps is quickly getting popular, but it is important to keep up with the trends of DevOps. So, in this content, we will tell you some of the major trends you need to look out for in 2022. 8 Major DevOps trends for 2022 1. Automated approaches DevOps believes in the "automate everything" method. Automation can boost the speed of software delivery and reduce the lead time. The other benefit of adopting this trend is that you can market your product faster and improve the entire process. The other benefits are – driving flexibility, agility, etc. Adopting this trend is beneficial; however, it can increase the load of deploying & monitoring. But it can be a blessing as it can help reduce human errors due to ignorance. And the companies who have used this trend are enjoying the positive results. 2. Serverless computing Serverless computing is a new concept that is only around us for around a decade. It is a useful trend, but it has been seen that companies have been slow in adopting this trend. There may be 2 major reasons for this – lack of industry support and fear of less return on investment. If we talk about the benefits of serverless computing, efficiency & dependability are its major advantages. It also removes the danger of maintenance concerns of traditional frameworks. So, if organisations use this trend, they can employ their resources on higher-priority tasks without fearing infrastructure administration. 3. Increase in DevSecOps adoption Security concerns are growing with the rise of technology, especially in the DevOps community. Security threats seem to lurk at every corner as cloud computing usage increases. Thus, DevSecOps adoption is increasingly more important in businesses. The trend is useful for securing the entire IT environment. 4. Infrastructure Automation (IA) DevOps teams look to use IA tools to automate their processes. It emphasises automation in the delivery, configuration, and administration of IT infrastructure and ensures that DevOps personnel are empowered. IA can help in the infrastructure orchestration for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. There are also on-premise design delivery services, cloud settings, and efficient resource provisioning. Also Read: DataOps vs. DevOps: A detailed comparison 5. Resilience testing Resilience testing is the thing that the DevOps community has been concentrating on for a long time. A convergence of testing, observability, and resilience testing is becoming common. When it comes to DevOps technologies, there is a rapid digital change happening. The market will also know that both public & private clouds have endless scalability. 6. Increasing adoption of GitOps In the process of development, there is always a need for the tools with which the developers are familiar. In the current era, GitOps with DevOps is the most useful technique for continuous delivery. If we are more specific, the operating paradigm for developing cloud-native applications is based on new technologies. GitOps also enables one-stop deployment, monitoring and management. Thus, one can use it as the source of declarative infrastructure and applications. 7. DevOps performance evaluation As IT is becoming more important to businesses, it is vital to increase the ability to deliver innovations quickly & safely. Try to create a release management implementation plan for this purpose. The goal of DevOps is re-imagining the way of software delivery by focusing on delivering value to the end-users through automation & collaboration. It may be easy to lose sight of the most important element when dealing with complex modifications to complex processes. Measuring the performance of DevOps is the fundamental basis on which you may examine the impact of changes, which will catch up as time goes on. 8. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) ‘IaC’ is much more than automation in DevOps, and the importance of IaC is increasing quickly. It's more equivalent to managing the full IT infrastructure on the cloud via configuration files. And, for optimising the software release, you can use an IT management tool. Conclusion In conclusion, we would say that DevOps is getting increasingly popular rapidly. It has also shown positive results for the organisations. However, to stay in the competition, it is important to use the latest DevOps trends, which we have mentioned in this article. As enterprises migrate to the cloud, software engineering and application release processes have undergone a huge transformation over the past few years. Both development and operations teams have identified techniques and tactics to function seamlessly, reduce costs, and produce high-quality results. Therefore, traditional security practices are not suitable for such advanced agile approaches to software engineering. With a sharp increase in security breaches and hi-tech hacking tools, enterprises understood the importance of security in almost every stage of the application development and deployment lattice. Enter DevSecOps! DevSecOps is an advanced extension of the DevOps technique in application engineering. In this model, developers/software engineers, operations teams and security teams collaborate and function closely throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) workflows and continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. This integrated security approach enables you to maintain an accelerated pace of development while minimising risk and injecting security into the DevOps pipeline. Ensure to hire experienced services for test environment management in DevOps. DevSecOps ToolsDevSecOps tools have two fundamental objectives:
Release management, data processing and test environment management tools constitute vital components of DevSecOps since security automation and close integration are essential in a fast-paced DevOps environment. 4 Approaches To Integrate DevSecOps In Development CycleDevSecOps is a new disciple. And thus, it doesn’t yet have a defined or standardised toolset. In this article, we’ve discussed 9 types of tools that you can implement to inject security into your software development, testing, and deployment processes. Software Composition AnalysisSoftware Composition Analysis (SCA) or Open source vulnerability scanning evaluates open source elements, libraries, etc. Any detected open-source components are identified using their source, version, distribution, common platform enumeration (CPE), and other unique characteristics. These elements are then compared against vulnerability databases, application vendor security advisories, or other relevant security resources in the DevSecOps pipeline. SAST- Static Application Security TestingWith Static Application Security Testing (SAST), you or your developers can examine the source code for vulnerable or insecure coding, identifying potential security concerns that should be corrected. Each bug is assigned a severity level to help your developers prioritise resolution. DAST- Dynamic Application Security TestingDynamic Application Security Testing involves production and test environment management tools that automatically perform security scans on running applications. With DAST, you can identify several real threats without requiring access to source code. These tools generally scan the HTTP and HTML interfaces of software. Infrastructure Automation ToolsDevSecOps strongly leverages automation and modern techniques. These automation tools involve automating infrastructure configuration and security.
Tools in this site reliability engineering category automatically identify and resolve several security vulnerabilities and configuration concerns for different cloud environments components. To sustain and progress in today’s competitive IT industry, your organisation needs to make the application release process faster, trustworthy, predictable, and streamlined. And having a robust enterprise release management process is necessary to accomplish that desired streamlining of workflows. However, achieving that precision in software release processes is still a distant desire for many—if not most—IT firms. If you’re looking to improve and streamline your release management process, you’ve just landed at the correct place. In this article, we’ll discuss six crucial steps you require to take if you desire to achieve a successful release management process. Without any delays, let’s get started! What Is Enterprise Release Management Process?As discussed previously, to stay afloat in the competitive industry, you’ll require to be consistent in delivering high-quality applications at an accelerated pace. To accomplish that objective, your teams need to ensure the software development and release processes are as smooth and uneventful as possible. For attaining the desired speed and efficiency, the comprehensive utilisation of automation is necessary. Comprehensive test automation can also help you achieve quality. You can deliver your users an immersive application usage experience with fewer bugs and significantly reduced downtime. That’s what the release management process leveraging DevOps solutions is all about: enhancing the speed and consistency of the application development and delivery processes without compromising quality. 6 Steps To Improve Your Release Management ProcessOrganise And Plan The Specifics Of Your ReleaseThe initial and most crucial step in a successful release management process is to plan the specific release. Which techniques should be applied at which point of the development cycle, resources to be utilised for that particular release, required infrastructure, the flow of the process, roles and responsibilities of relevant individuals/teams, etc., should be highlighted in your release plan. When planning the release, everyone, specifically your project’s stakeholder, must be on board about the set of functions that the release will involve. Code Development And TestingOnce the release plan is approved by the relevant stakeholders, your team now needs to start working on the actual development of the application update. Testing is required to be integrated into the application development process from the very beginning. You enhance the probability of discovering bugs before they reach production and resolve the issues when it’s easier to do so. Move Forward With UATUser acceptance testing (UAT) can be defined as an approach for validating that a solution functions properly for the user. This type of testing involves a certain percentage of your target audience using the software to determine whether it’s simple to understand, easy to use and meets its requirements and expected quality standards. Get Stakeholder Approval For The ReleaseThrough UAT testing and various QA processes, once you or your team have ensured that the release meets its requirements, it’s sometimes necessary to get formal approval from the stakeholders. Deploy The Application UpdateOnce the above processes are completed successfully, it’s time to deliver the application update to the world. The enterprise release process doesn’t end there. Testing in production has now become a vital and integral element of a modern QA strategy. Additionally, you’ll need to ensure real-time monitoring of the production application is performed. With real-time monitoring, your team can identify any issues and address them as quickly as possible. Automate Aggressively And ResponsiblyAutomation is emerging as the backbone of the release management process. Therefore, it is important that you leverage automation in your release processes as frequently as possible.
However, you must be implementing the correct automation at the correct places. And that’s it! You’re ready for planning and execute a streamlined release management process. DevSecOps represents a security-focused, continuous integration & delivery, application development life cycle (SDLC). The best practices of DevOps culture and workflow lay the foundation of the DevSecOps environment. With the integration of the DevOps values and application security, the verification becomes an agile, integral part of the development process. In conventional systems, security is often considered a secondary system. What Is DevSecOps Approach?Generally, the security team actively engages with the application development teams towards the end of the development lifecycle. However, finding security vulnerabilities and bugs at the end of your SDLC isn’t but frustrating but involves expensive rectification. DevSecOps security introduces traditional security practices to an active SDLC workflow. Typically DevOps (a collaboration of development and operation without security component) has implemented concepts of continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD). These evolved processes actively test and verify code correctness during the agile development workflow. Similarly, in the agile development pipeline, DevSecOps implements operational security audits. DevSecOps advocates that security needs to be built into the application process or product development rather than applied to a finished product. Also Read: 6 Best Practices To Include In Your Release Management Implementation Plan Why DevSecOps Is Necessary For Your SDLC Workflow?The livelihood and lifestyle of modern society are technology-driven. Therefore, safety and risk elimination in these technical applications or products is imperative. Combat The Evolving Nature Of ThreatsWith the advancement and evolution of technology, the intricacy and the frequency of malicious attacks have increased exponentially. Security breaches are one of the greatest challenges the IT industry and our governments face in the current era. Various eminent IT enterprises such as Meta, LinkedIn, etc., have been breached in recent times. Such security exposure leads to huge fallouts and expensive penalties. Failed security systems make the news headlines as end-users and clients continue to lose faith in the compromised system developers. Ensure the application of correct test environment management tools to reduce manual redundancies and improve efficiency in the testing process. Ensures Efficient Collaboration And Robust Security ChecksDevSecOps philosophy fosters active communication and avoids late transition to IT security professionals. Without DevSecOps principles, your product or codebase may be rendered insecure at the last moment, leading to several expensive iterations. After implementing DevSecOps, IT security gold standards are baked into your application development system. Although it is not always feasible to remove all the vulnerabilities in the initial phases, however, the probability of finding a complex codebase issue at the last moment is much lower. Supports The CI/CD Pipeline And Other Continuous ProcessesSecurity vulnerabilities can exist equally in both the open-source software libraries from where codes are imported by your developers and the code that is originally developed by application engineers.
Numerous lines of code are developed regularly, and manual code reviews are unable to scale. This is where DevSecOps security advantages are useful. DevSecOps functions collaboratively with the continuous everything paradigm and enables continuity to secure your software deliverables. DevSecOps environment allows integration of automated security checks within your SDLC pipeline to deliver early warnings and monitor escaped security vulnerabilities consistently. This Integrated continuous security leveraged through techniques scale as your business expands. An efficient and well-built test environment constitutes plenty of components and an intricate array of configurations. Without an effective and robust test environment management strategy, your testing phase can turn into complete mayhem, thus, affecting the accuracy and viability of the test results. Since every testing approach has a unique code requirement, a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t very helpful. Your test environment needs to be customized depending on the requirements of the specific code under analysis. Due to the numerous variable elements, the creation, configuration, and setup of a test environment can become a precarious affair. Therefore a robust test environment management plan and relevant software release management tools are necessary. While the test environment comprises a platform with relevant software and hardware components required for a specific test, TEM encompasses monitoring this arrangement to ensure smooth workflow within the environment. For successful test environment management, there are certain roadblocks that you should avoid at all costs. Wondering what those are? Let’s find out! 4 Mistakes To Avoid In Your Test Environment Management StrategyCreating A Test Environment Without Precise Understanding Of The RequirementsDeveloping a test environment without clearly knowing the test requirements can create a serious gap between expectation and the actual delivery. The result? You’ll end up serving apples to someone who wants strawberries. A misaligned test environment can have a completely different set of configurations, software and hardware components necessary for performing a specific test. This misalignment will cause false and incorrect results, expensive delays and ultimately disappointed customers. Test Environment Not Replicating The Production EnvironmentThe modern DevOps approach requires testing at every stage of the software development. Developers perform tests in the development environment itself on the codes they write before advancing them to the next phase. Testing/QA environment is concerned with regression testing to ensure that the newly developed features do not affect the existing ones. Your staging environment should replicate the production environment as closely as possible. With better replication, your testers will be able to predict the application behaviour in the real world. The staging environment enables the identification of maximum bugs and prevents their leakage into the production or live environment. Monitor your test environment management process diligently to avoid expensive discrepancies. Not Maintaining A Centralised Knowledge RepositoryCentralisation of test environment management has two fundamental advantages– ownership and team alignment. Without a centralised knowledge repository, knowledge gaps can arise when manual changes are done to any test environment setup. These gaps lead to inefficiencies during test runs. A centralized repository enables end-to-end visibility of real-time actions. It allows every relevant team member to be on the same page regarding recent updates and modifications. Not Following Data Masking ProtocolsUsing your production data without any encryption for testing can be a substantial risk. Although production data can yield accurate results within a short span of time, you’ll expose sensitive information to hackers and undetected code vulnerabilities.
This won’t just lead to hefty penalties but also loss of trust among your clients. An effective and efficient test environment management strategy is essential for the smooth functioning of your test environment and high-quality test outputs. Integrate the best TEM tools and start optimising your TEM strategy. Small organisations and startups frequently need to compete with bigger, structured enterprises to sustain and succeed in the IT industry. These big-scale enterprises have adequate capability to allocate greater resources for IT project portfolio management and strategise management implementation plan. Thus, small teams, individual developers and startups need to organise and execute their release management plan to stay ahead in the competition and keep the business running. In this article, we'll discuss various tips and techniques to manage releases, best practices and guidelines. To ensure a streamlined process hire expert professionals for release management and data compliance. Let's get started! How Small Organisations Can Streamline Release Workflows? Determining And Formalising A Standard Release Management Implementation PlanMost large scale organisations have a formal release management plan that is followed by every team member and governed by TLs or managers. However, the scenario is significantly different in startups and small scale organisations. In such setups, some members of the software development team might not be aware of the intricacies of the software release management process. Only experienced and seasoned members might be a few individuals who are completely aware of the bottlenecks created in the development and deployment workflows. Therefore it is imperative to thoroughly document this knowledge and formalise the release management plan. Otherwise, the entire process can end up in chaos and confusion. How? Let's find out! Preparing A Release ChecklistA documented release process allows developers and operations teams to work in collaboration towards a common goal. A release checklist must be maintained on a shared platform (wiki, Google Drive or any other shared document/spreadsheet). By sharing this crucial release document with the entire team and granting editing permissions, every member in your organisation gets the opportunity to provide their inputs and formally defined release process. This puts everyone on the same page. Every team member will know and understand how the process works. Additionally, occasional discussions empower your team to improve and innovate the release management implementation plan every now and then. This should enable transparency in the release process and allow the entire team to have a clear and precise idea of what's going on during the release, what processes have been completed, and by whom. By taking a look at this spreadsheet, the stakeholders can also decide whether to give a "green signal" or not based on the results of the steps. Leverage Canary Or Beta TestingReleasing your new software to your entire user base all at once can be a risky move. One minor issue can disrupt all your hard work. Beta testing or canary launching is a moderately safe method to test the new features of your application. With this method, you can test the updates on your users' 1% (or less) instead of 100%. You can use the feature flag or any monitoring system that allows you to easily turn the functionality on and off. Automate Whenever PossibleImplementing automation from end-to-end might not be possible in smaller organisations, mostly due to the lack of resources or expertise. However, try to implement automation wherever possible. This reduces the risk of human errors and allows your team to dedicate more time to innovation. Various tools and agencies provide support to small scale organisations to introduce automation on manual tasks and implement data compliance across the software release process. Track Metrics And Rely On Data-Drive ResultsMeasuring the outcomes of a process or success of your current release management implementation plan is essential for continuous improvement.
Ensure to set up monitoring for analysing and understanding your application's performance before, during, and after your release. Some essential metrics include load time, downtime, uptime, error rate, conversions, etc. You can modify the metric based on the project requirements. Use this guide and get professional assistance to bring your release management on track and build a great portfolio of happy clients. In the modern world, technology is evolving every day, and so are the customer demands. IT businesses are encountering immense responsibility. With ever-evolving user expectations for enhanced digital experiences, companies who are unsuccessful in adapting will get eliminated from the race eventually. With the immense burden of new application development and software updates, most IT teams fail to function efficiently and are often deemed as bottlenecks, financial burdens, and unworthy of executive support. Siloed culture and conventional, outdated workflows fuel this vicious cycle to continue. This doesn’t just hinder your department performance but also deteriorates business growth. As the saying goes, “Modern problems require modern solutions” DevOps is that modern solution. It involves certain techniques, processes, and practices that can overcome these degrading cultural norms and workflows. With professional DevOps solutions, you can inculcate new clarity, efficiency and performance within your organisational workflow. Once your entire firm successfully adopts DevOps culture, you get the opportunity to outperform your competitors. What Is The Goal Of The DevOps Approach?Trying to accommodate modern demands with conventional methods has led to many IT organisations losing control over the workflows. The collaboration and coordination between the app development and operation go to the toss. Bottlenecks develop in long-term projects, increased coding issues, overworked resources, last-minute scrambles, poor application quality, increased downtime and ultimately disappointed customers. Each of these issues doesn’t just contribute to loss of revenue, but your brand reputation gets in jeopardy. DevOps goal is reversing these issues stacked against IT and ultimately transforming an inherent “concern” into an impeccable strategic solution. What Are the Benefits Of Implementing DevOps Culture?Implementing DevOps culture with the assistance of professional IT enterprise solutions has various benefits:
Also Read: Should You Invest In DataOps Services? What Are The Components Of DevOps?If you think DevOps can magically transform your organisational workflow and give you the benefits overnight, you’re mistaken. DevOps require consistent nurturing, acceptance, education and upgrading your work structure to reap the benefits. DevOps solutions include six fundamental components that you need to adapt and implement in your business practices:
ConclusionIf your business needs a radical transformation, DevOps could be your solution. Using the correct approaches, tools, principles, processes, culture, governance and implementation methods, DevOps solutions just uplift your revenue figures but emperors your entire organisation.
The revolutionising digitisation and technical transformation in the application development world have made two factors mandatory. These two factors are necessary to sustain, grow and enhance your IT business in the competitive world- fast releases and continuous change. Therefore irrespective of the type of software development you venture into efficient release plan and environment management tool is necessary. For maintaining quality CI/CD pipelines and delivering value to users rapidly, your DevOps and IT teams need to optimise change and release management plan consistently to enhance operational efficiency. Change management denotes any updating or changing process, not strictly limited to DevOps and IT. However, it’s crucial that you determine and understand organisational change management best practices and implement them while working towards a successful release management pipeline. With greater flexibility and change accommodation, you can address the production bugs faster and smoothly push your release through the application development lifecycle. In this article, we’ll explain the release and change management process and also highlight how these two factors function harmoniously to benefit your DevOps and relevant IT teams everywhere. Change And Release Management Plan ExplainedChange ManagementIn the DevOps and application development realm, change management signifies your team’s capability to manage configurations efficiently, execute automated tests, alert on-call responders and mitigate known and unknown risks across all applications and operations. Release ManagementRelease management plan encompasses the technical part of the application development process- drafting release planning, code development, quality testing, preparation, and deployment of new features and services to production environments. Why Release and Change Management Needs To Work Together?Software engineers and IT operations collaborate and equally contribute to the release management process for delivering quick and quality services/products to your clients. Change management is primarily concerned with the people side of change and how your people will function with changing approaches and tools. While release management includes specific technical methodologies and processes for delivering efficiently delivering product features to production. Your release management plan (involving creating new work processes and implementing evolved technologies) might not be successful and achieve its full potential unless you bring your people along. Your organisational financial success significantly depends on how effectively your people have embraced the change. Therefore, change management involves implementing a structured approach and specific tools to lead the people side of change and achieve the desired outcome. With the correct release and change management protocols and the accurate IT environment management tool, you can rapidly release and deploy your application without compromising quality. 5 Practical Ways To Efficient Change And Release ManagementDetermine Why You Need The Change And How To Do ItImplementing a change in your release management plan without understanding the benefits can create confusion. The functioning of your IT operation teams is determined by two elements- reliability and stability in the SDLC. Therefore, for your people to readily embrace the change, you’ll need to explain how the new techniques function, how the implementation plan is strategised and why it’s important for your organisation. Outline The Scope And Budget For The PlanImplementing any small or big changes in your organisation requires a plan. You need to develop a detailed layout that outlines who and how gets affected by the change and the financial expenditure associated with the change. Perform a cost-benefit analysis to understand and measure if the costs involved in the change are worth the benefits you’ll get to enjoy. While financial budgeting is necessary, you cannot overlook the human cost.
Have Standard And Proactive Alert, Observation And Response PlanA detailed monitoring system and alert throughout your complete release management process can help you define a proactive incident management strategy. So, when things go south or complexities arise in production, both your DevOps and IT operations teams understand the context and have the correct tools to address the issues. Define A Communication PlanWith real-time collaboration and greater visibility across the release management workflows, eliminating bottlenecks, fixing bugs, and delivering a high-quality customer valve becomes fast and smooth. Efficient Tracking StrategyAccurate tracking, incident management event, and release management metrics reporting can help you improve how you implement change in the future.
With comprehensive reports and tracking details, you can understand the effects of any previously introduced change and start drawing a table of what worked well and what didn’t. |