Modern release management

A few years ago, when I was in the middle of a manual deployment at 4 A.M., I remember asking myself "there has to be a better way". Tools were not mature enough, and the majority of the companies did not consider IT the core of their business. Then, a change happened: DevOps tools started to do well in the open source community and companies started to create continuous delivery pipelines. Some of them were successful, but a big majority of them failed for two reasons:

• Release management process
• Failure in the organizational alignment

We will talk about organizational alignment later on in this chapter. For now, we are going to focus on the release management process as it needs to be completely different from the traditional release management in order to facilitate the software life cycle.

In the preceding section, we talked about different phases:

• Requirements
• Design
• Implementation
• Verification
• Maintenance

We also explained how it works well with gigantic software where we group features into big releases that get executed in a big bang style with all or nothing deployments.

The first try to fit this process into smaller software components was what everyone calls agile, but no one really knew what it was.