Long downtimes, annoying bugs, unsatisfied users!
All these things are not just daunting for your development team but for your organisation as well.
In the ever-evolving and advancing IT industry, you can’t afford to release half-baked application features. To avoid expensive delays in your delivery pipeline and keep your organisational workflows running smoothly, you should invest in a well-strategized release management implementation plan and robust tools.
Application release management is a comprehensive process that encompasses software development, test environment management, deployment, and release.
Although the best practices for software release management might vary, a set of definitive processes remains the same for every organisation.
Best Practices To Include In Your Release Management Implementation Plan
1. Review The Existing Release Process
For improving a process, you’ll need to examine your existing process and determine the major areas that require improvement. Try to identify gaps, bottlenecks, and bugs that require immediate resolution.
2. Schedule Regular Release Cycles
A crucial contributing factor for successful application release management is scheduling and maintaining a regular release cycle. With regular release cycles, you can discuss the potential requirement for non-functional testing and incorporate regular feedback.
3. Maintain Transparency In Your Release Process
Maintaining transparency about the release workflows among your stakeholder, application developers, operational team, quality assurance analysts, and other relevant teams is vital for a successful release management process.
Bottlenecks like lack of transparency and siloed culture between the stakeholders and relevant teams can create disagreements, conflicts, confusion, and unnecessary delays. All such hurdles will ultimately adversely impact the quality of your release process.
4. Introduce Automation and Standardisation
Automation and standardisation are the pillars of a successful release management process. While automation improves efficiency and reduces the time for repetitive and mundane manual tasks.
Thus you can drastically reduce the time taken in your release workflows while preserving the quality and accuracy of the software process.
5. Establish A Consistent and Systemic Communication System
No matter how efficient and advanced your automation and standardisation are, it can bring you benefits unless used efficiently by every team. Therefore, eliminating bottlenecks through establishing efficient communication channels is the key to improving your software quality.
With consistent, seamless communication, your teams can function appropriately without creating any misunderstandings and unnecessary arguments.
6. Focus On Zero Downtime
Why should your users wait while you do the maintenance work? Scheduled downtime messages aren’t just annoying for your users but for your release team as well since they’ll need to plan the deployment at eerie hours when the traffic is low.
Instead, using two identical production servers seems a more viable option. Route your traffic to the active production server. You can use the other production environment as your playground to implement the updates.
Once you’ve completed testing and launched the updated codebase, you can re-route the traffic to your updated server.
Hire professional agencies to help you prepare a robust plan and integrate release management tools within your release workflows.
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