What Is Release Management? A Complete Guide

Release management aims to safely get your product into the hands of your users and customers. It guides how you package, test, and roll out new releases, updates, fixes, and enhancements.

Release managers drive this process. They oversee the intricate steps of deploying changes to production environments, ensuring that new releases take off without incidents and land safely in the real world.

Good release management practices help to:

• Reduce risks
• Minimize downtime
• Ensure compliance
• Provide a seamless experience for end users.

It combines several disciplines into one release management framework, including project management, software development, testing, and operations. This helps you reliably deliver your changes on a regular and expected basis.

Release management brings order, control, and confidence to the software delivery process—contrary to the famous growth motto, it allows you to move fast without breaking things.

It’s a vital practice for any product team that wants to engage its users with a steady stream of high-quality releases.

Some of its most valuable benefits are:

• Reduced risk and errors: Established plans, rigorous testing, and approval gates help you minimize the risk of releasing low-quality code changes that may introduce bugs or disrupt services. It enforces tight control over what gets deployed to production.

• Higher reliability and uptime: Coordinating and scheduling your release carefully means conflicts get spotted early. Technical validation ensures releases won’t impact other systems or cause downtime for end users, making your services more reliable.

• Faster time-to-market: Solid processes enable teams to confidently roll out more frequently, with less drama and chaos. New features and fixes get delivered to customers on a more predictable schedule.

• Improved visibility and communication: Release management provides a clear schedule of upcoming deployments and a structured framework for communicating these changes across different teams, managers, and stakeholders.

• Compliance and auditability: With documented processes and approval trails, it’s easier to comply with external regulations or internal governance policies. In short, all your deployments are auditable.

• Knowledge sharing: Centralized practices enable you to transfer knowledge between various teams. There’s a standardized process everyone must follow rather than isolated areas of knowledge.

Following a release management process gives your team the structure, checkpoints, and controls to mitigate risks and deliver excellent releases.

Although this plan might vary between organizations, most teams follow a similar overarching release management workflow with some key stages.

Release planning

In this first phase, upcoming product releases are planned and scheduled according to your business priorities, product roadmaps, and the readiness of the new features or fixes (i.e., where they are in the development pipeline).

This usually involves:

• Assessing change requests and determining the release scope
• Defining what the release needs, its objectives, and what success looks like
• Identifying which components, systems, and environments will be impacted
• Scheduling release timelines so they align with business events and deadlines
• Assigning roles and responsibilities across relevant teams

Build and configuration

With the releases mapped out, the next stage is configuring the actual release packages (changes or updates) to be deployed.

You might do the following:

• Gather all the code updates, data scripts, and configuration files from your development team
• Use automated build processes to assess release artifacts consistently
• Version and create package manifests (root files) for tracking and audibility
• Carry out code and package integrity checks before going to the next stage

Testing and validation

You’ll now have a “release candidate”—a sneak preview of your updated product used to help teams catch bugs and errors before it moves to the “final version” and is shared with your users.

The release candidate goes through several types of testing across various pre-production environments, including:

• Functional, integration, regression, and user acceptance testing
• Performance, load, stress, and security testing
• Data validation checks against pre-defined test cases or scripts
• Bug triaging and defect resolution

When everything passes, you can finally approve the release.

Staging and readiness

The release is officially validated and approved and enters the final preparation stage.

This means:

• Creating rollback or backout plans in case of failures
• Scheduling maintenance windows and communicating what impact the change will have
• Updating documentation, knowledge bases, and release notes
• Provisioning production-like staging environments
• Carrying out final operational readiness checks and mock deployments

Deployment

The release artifacts get pushed out to production environments when the scheduled deployment window arrives.

Deployment typically encompasses the following:

• Adhering to strict change control processes and approval workflows
• Using automated deployment tools and scripts where possible
• Phasing rollouts, such as pilot, partial, and full deploys, as needed
• Capturing deployment logs and metrics for auditing

Monitoring and support

As the new release goes live in production, it enters an important monitoring and support phase.

Your monitoring systems are on high alert to identify issues proactively, and support teams are prepared to address the problems rapidly.

If any incidents arise, you have defined escalation paths and processes to handle them. This means you can quickly roll back or make fixes if necessary.

Review and closing

After a set period of stable operation in a production setting (i.e., nothing has gone wrong, and the change or update is working as intended), the release cycle can be officially completed.

You can close the release management lifecycle by:

• Conducting retrospective meetings to find areas of improvement
• Analyzing key metrics around release quality, cycle times, etc.
• Documenting the lessons learned and iterating on release processes
• Doing an official sign-off and handover to your regular operation teams

The new product is live, your users are (hopefully) happy, and you have all the information and insights you need to plan for future releases.

A clear, detailed release management plan helps you to implement an effective release process.

Creating one usually involves:

• Defining your objectives and scope: Outline your goals for release management and which products or systems will be covered. Determine who needs to be involved and align your stakeholders.

• Documenting the current state: Analyze any existing release management processes (even if they’re more ad hoc) to identify gaps, bottlenecks, and places to improve.

• Establishing governance: Define the roles, approval authorities, and policies you’ll use to manage and enforce the process.

• Designing the process: Detail how you’ll plan, build, test, deploy, and monitor the release.

• Evaluating your tooling needs: Determine what tools you need to help you plan, automate, communicate, monitor, and report the release.

• Setting release cadences: Based on your product strategy, set targets for how often you’ll deploy major or minor releases and patches.

• Defining testing practices: Implement rigorous testing plans, including entry and exit criteria and test environments.

• Preparing production monitoring: Decide what metrics to track to help measure your release's quality, performance, and success.

• Enabling communication plans: Develop protocols for release notifications, status updates, and reporting.

• Incorporating continuous improvement: Build in feedback loops through metric reviews, retrospectives, and audits.

The plan should be a living document—comprehensive yet flexible enough to evolve as your products, technologies, and requirements change. However, formally establishing it provides guardrails for orchestrating all your release management activities.

Effective release management means embracing some industry-proven best practices—a release management checklist, if you like.

These time-tested techniques help organizations overcome challenges and maximize the impact of their release efforts.

Automate everything you can

Use automation tools and scripts to speed up repetitive steps like building, packaging, testing, deploying, and verifying releases.

Automation reduces manual effort and human errors. Enact continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to automatically progress the update through different stages.

Use proper source control

Manage all release artifacts (source code, configs, scripts, etc.) through a version control system.

This provides an auditable and traceable process and allows you to recreate prior releases. Proper branching strategies and merging systems are also essential.

Gather quantitative metrics

Measure metrics that offer insight into your release process—the deployment frequency, lead times, mean time to recover (MTTR), release quality, etc.

Use these measurements to pinpoint bottlenecks, risks, and opportunities for continuous improvement.

Support collaboration and communication

Transparent release communications and knowledge sharing will keep all teams—such as Dev, Ops, QA, security, product, and stakeholders—aligned.

Provide release schedules, notifications, and status updates and share learnings from incidents.

Have a rollback plan

Develop strategies to revert or disable faulty deployments quickly if issues arise after release.

Rollback mechanisms like blue/green deployments or canary launches can help you recover rapidly with minimal product downtime.

Maintain separate environments

Ensure you have dedicated development, testing, staging, and production environments.

Non-production environments should closely mirror real life for more accurate testing. Keep everything separate, consistent, and organized.

Monitor from the start

Monitor everything from the earliest stages of product development.

Real-time visibility into the system's performance, health, and errors is critical before and after deployments so you can catch and manage possible issues.

Don’t skimp on testing

Make testing a priority—not something you only do if you have time.

Perform testing practices that cover static analytics, unit tests, integration, performance, security, and user acceptance testing. To help, you can automate your testing using frameworks and tools.

Your software release management can benefit massively from using purpose-built tools to automate and streamline your activities.

Let’s look at some of the solutions most popular with product teams.

Jira

Jira (by Atlassian) is a project management and issue-tracking tool that provides release management capabilities. It enables teams to plan releases, track issues, manage change requests, and visualize release roadmaps.

Its strong integration with development tools makes Jira’s release management features suitable for agile release management and more traditional processes.

Plutora

Putora is a dedicated enterprise release management platform that offers complete visibility and governance over the entire software delivery pipeline.

Its features include release planning, risk analysis, environment tracking, automated deployments, and reporting and metrics.

Azure Pipelines

Microsoft’s Azure Pipelines is a cloud-hosted CI/CD service that facilitates automating build, test, and deployment workflows.

It supports containerized releases and approvals and integrates with other Azure services like Repos and Boards.

Octopus Deploy

Octopus Deploy is a popular release management software enabling reliable and repeatable deployments across multiple environments and cloud providers.

Its strengths include multi-tenant deployments, guided failure modes, runbook automation, and monitoring integrations.

Change management is a broader discipline that helps transition organizations and individuals to a desired way of doing things.

It provides a structured approach for implementing changes across a business—from new policies and processes to system and tool changes. The focus is primarily on managing the people side of change.

Think of change management as the “big picture” strategy. Release management, on the other hand, is a way to carry out a specific change tactically—like software deployments.

The two practices can function together. Change management provides the high-level framework and communications plan for successfully moving to a new software release. In contrast, release management supplies the nuts and bolts for safely releasing that new software.

Data insights and smooth, effective software releases go hand in hand.

Amplitude collects vital touchpoints and information to help you better understand your product and users. It provides critical context to help you validate releases, monitor their real-world impact, and prioritize future improvements.

• Analyze product usage data and measure the effect of your changes. Slice the data by each release version to see how the features are being adopted, where users are getting stuck in new flows, and spot potential issues.

• Run A/B tests and experiments when rolling out releases to sub-sets of users. Validate hypotheses, measure key metrics, and make data-driven decisions before fully deploying your changes.

Use deep behavioral data to guide what you need to release and when. Inspect usage patterns, retention, and conversion funnel performance, and uncover areas of user frustration you can address in new releases.