Stream Step

Enterprise application development teams are wrestling with more of everything – more systems, more services, more projects and more environments.  And less time to do it in - as cycle times for development are accelerating with increased testing automation and virtualized lab environments. All of this is making the release process more complex and error prone than ever before.  Today, most enterprises use spreadsheets, checklists, bridge lines and emails to coordinate complex release processes.  Release automation is typically low level and command line driven - in the form of scripts which are manually run or scheduled by release engineers or developer.  This patchwork of tools is failing to deliver as the number and frequency of deployments increase.

Release Management Challenges
• Process errors due to lack of end-to-end process coordination
• Delays due to cross-organizational hand-offs and lack of communication
• Expertise linked to a few key individuals
• Lack of metrics to drive improvement objectives

Impacts
• Increased cost – Inefficient processes result in reduced development throughput for business objectives
• Increased risk - Reduced development and testing time negatively affects quality driving production outages and slowdowns

The goal of this Blog is to discuss the challenges and solutions - we have seen in the sphere of Application Release Management - and hopefully deliver some value to the larger development community.