7 Release Management Best Practices To Improve Deployments

Establishing effective software launch processes can help teams collaborate more effectively, create positive experiences for end users, satisfy business goals and meet deadlines. Release management is one strategy that development teams can use to keep their projects focused and up to standard. If you occupy a leadership position in a software development team, understanding the utility and application of release management can help you ensure consistently successful deployments.

In this article, we define what release management is, introduce seven best practices you can use to ensure successful software launches and discuss the importance of effective release management in software development.

What is release management?

Release management, or deployment management, is a process that software development teams use to plan, test and release their projects. Release management systems can accommodate various methodologies—such as agile frameworks and waterfall — and help teams to:

• Satisfy business goals

• Meet delivery deadlines

• Optimize user experience

• Collaborate effectively

• Shorten feedback loops

DevOps teams use release management as a framework to guide them through the software development life cycle.

Phases of release management

The two priorities of release management are continuous integration and continuous delivery. To accomplish these goals, teams typically follow the five standard release management phases:

1. Define: In this stage, development teams work to understand the software’s requirements and functions.

2. Specify: In the next stage, teams create testable standards for each of the requirements they defined in step one.

3. Test: Companies can use multiple strategies to test their software requirements against the criteria they specified. They may choose to simulate the real production environment or ask a small group of beta testers to sample certain features using what’s called a dark launch.

4. Refine: Step four requires teams to evaluate their test results and other key performance indicators, or KPIs, to determine whether the product, software or application meets the performance criteria. If it doesn’t, teams can work to improve their product’s performance until it reaches the standard.

5. Release: The last stage of the release management process is deploying software to a wider audience.

7 release management best practices

Here are seven best practices that can help you achieve success in your software, application, or feature launches:

1. Carefully define your criteria

By clearly establishing your acceptance requirements, you can remove confusion and ensure your release accomplishes all of its goals. Try to set quantitative goals and release metrics that are objective and easily measured. This way, there’s less room for confusion because the team has obvious expectations and can easily gauge how well they’re doing based on predetermined KPIs, like conversions, error rate or total downloads.

2. Consider a dark launch

A dark launch is a strategy that development teams use to test new features without the consequences associated with a full launch. Applying this practice can allow you to:

• Scale up: By starting with a small group of testers, you can observe how your software performs under increased loads and thereby improve its predictability. Releasing features gradually can minimize the effects of errors.

• Control your audience: In a dark launch, you can choose which audience members you expose to your software or features. The audience you choose might represent users from more tolerant groups rather than those from regulated industries like government or finance.

• Respond quickly: Another benefit of dark launches is your ability to enable feature flags. These allow you to pull features if they’re not functioning the way you want them to and resolve errors quickly.

3. Automate processes

Automating processes within your release management phases, like quality assurance, can speed up your development cycle and reduce instances of human error. Some management tools allow you to set feature releases in advance or establish release schedules so that you can scale up more effectively. By automating processes, your teams can increase their productivity, maintain consistency across releases and focus more of their time on other areas.

4. Track metrics

When defining your requirements and establishing your criteria, consider creating trackable metrics that allow you to see your progress and ensure you’re meeting goals. Metrics like downloads, error rate, load time, uptime, conversions and downtime can help you evaluate your progress and keep development teams aligned with the business’s goals. Throughout the development process, test your features often to make sure you’re meeting requirements. By establishing consistent and quantitative metrics early, teams can more clearly understand expectations and objectives.

5. Review launches

After a launch, evaluate your product and your team’s performance to find areas of improvement. Evaluate the effectiveness of your metrics and performance indicators, and identify which parts of your process worked well and which you could work to enhance. Specifically, determine how you can increase speed, encourage collaboration and develop better communication among your team.

6. Reduce user impact

By prioritizing testing and establishing reliable criteria, you can reduce the impact on your users and ensure seamless rollouts. Work to release updates effectively and quickly so that users can enjoy an error-free experience. Dark launches and other proactive testing measures may help minimize deployment risks. Real-time alerts and continuous monitoring can also help you identify, limit and resolve incidents during your release.

7. Imitate production environments

During staging and testing, try to create an environment that’s as close to real-life production situations as possible. If you’re creating updates, consider making entirely new updates rather than modifying old ones. This can reduce your risk of bugs and errors in your releases and ensure more reliable products that meet user, business and client standards.

Why is release management important?

Release management is important because it helps teams:

• Mitigate risk: Release management can help teams throughout the software delivery life cycle by ensuring they’re adequately testing their features, meeting business needs and providing optimal performance.

• Consistently meet deadlines: The release management framework can help keep teams focused to make sure they’re reliably meeting deadlines and accomplishing goals.

• Align development and business goals: By establishing requirements and criteria early on, the management style emphasizes teams’ abilities to meet business goals and develop consistent testing parameters.

• Optimize the development and release process: Release management prioritizes streamlined processes and removes unnecessary steps within the system development life cycle. This keeps teams focused and helps them follow through on the plan they outlined early in the project’s life cycle.

• Encourage collaboration: The system depends on team collaboration to work effectively. Because teams have to work together to define the requirements and set the parameters, release management encourages team cooperation early on and through each of the five phases.

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