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.
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