Release management is a growing discipline for managing software releases through all stages of development, testing, and deployment. As software systems become more complex with distributed development and evolving platforms, a dedicated release manager is needed to oversee the integration of these different components. A release manager acts as a liaison between teams, takes responsibility for deploying software to production, helps create processes for efficient releases, and coordinates various projects, teams, and components. Some of the key challenges a release manager faces include managing software defects, issues, risks, change requests, and deployment packaging.

1. Release Management is the relatively new but rapidly growing discipline within software engineering of managing software releases.
As software systems, software development processes, and resources become more distributed, they invariably become more specialized
and complex. Furthermore, software products (especially web applications) are typically in an ongoing cycle of development, testing, and
release. Add to this an evolution and growing complexity of the platforms on which these systems run, and it becomes clearthere are a lot
of moving pieces that must fit together seamlessly to guarantee the success and long-term value of a product or project.
The need therefore exists for dedicated resources to oversee the integration and flow of development, testing, deployment, and support of
these systems. Although project managers have done this in the past, they generally are more concerned with high-level, "grand design"
aspects of a project or application, and so often do not have time to oversee some of the more technical or day-to-day aspects. Release
Managers (aka "RMs") address this need. They must have a general knowledge of every aspect of the Software Development Life Cycle
(SDLC), various applicable operating systems and software application or platforms, as well as various business functions and perspectives.
A Release Manager is:
 Facilitator – serves as a liaison between varying business units to guarantee smooth and timely delivery of software products or
updates.
 Gatekeeper – “holds the keys” to production systems/applications and takes responsibility for their implementations.
 Architect – helps to identify, create and/or implement processes or products to efficiently manage the release of code.
 Server Application Support Engineer – help troubleshoot problems with an application (although not typically at a code level).
 Coordinator – utilized to coordinate disparate source trees, projects, teams and components.
Some of the challenges facing a Software Release Manager include the management of:
 Software Defects
 Issues
 Risks
 Software Change Requests
 New Development Requests (additional features and functions)
 Deployment and Packaging
 New Development Tasks

2. 7 Ways to Improve Your Software Release Management
To come to completion, software projects take investment, support, nurturing and a lot of hard work and dedication. Good release
management practices ensure that when your software is built, it will be successfully deployed to the people who want to use it. We have
the opportunity to satisfy existing customers and hopefully to win new ones. Establishing a straightforward and lightweight release
management process will ensure future releases would happen on time and to the required quality.

3. 1. Understand the current state of release management.
2. Establish a regular release cycle.
Our release cycle is not about when your customer wants the release. It's about when you can deliver it to the desired level of
quality.
3. Get lightweight processes in place. Test them early and review them regularly.
Lightweight processes are those that do not require lengthy bureaucratic approvals or endless meetings to get agreement. They
usually require only the minimum acceptable level of inputs and outputs. What they lack in bulk and bureaucracy, they make up for
in response to change and popular adoption!
4. Establish a release infrastructure early.
Your release infrastructure is anything that needs to be in place to deploy the software and to enable users to use it. Your obligation
to the customer is not just that you build great software; it is that it's available forthem to access and use.
5. Automate and standardize as much as you can.
6. Establish positive expectations.
If getting software released is important to you, don't keep it a secret. Our teams improved their commitment to deliver the
software release when they knew it was important.
7. Invest in people.
People are inherently interested in doing good work. If we want the people on our teams to care about the product and about doing
a good job, we have to first demonstrate that we care about what is important to them.