DevOps: Strategies for Organizing Release Management

 

In this blog posting we describe two issues for organizing your release management strategy: How to scope release management and how to organize the team.

There are two fundamental issues to consider when scoping your release management efforts:

1. Paradigm support. Will your release management process focus on supporting one paradigm, such as agile/lean teams or will it provide a more holistic strategy to also support agile/lean teams, traditional teams, iterative teams, and even ad-hoc teams? Many people who are currently writing about release management tend to focus on a single paradigm, although they may not explicitly state this, but the reality is that most enterprise-class organizations need multi-paradigm support in practice.
2. Domain support. Will your release management process focus on IT-related issues or will it address the full range of business-related release issues? IT-related release issues include deploying new software and hardware into production. Business release issues may include marketing campaigns, training your sales force, and organizing external support mechanisms for end users to name a few. This is particularly important for commercial solutions being produced for the end customer of your organization.

These two issues lead us to the following quadrant chart depicting the potential scope for release management:

From a Disciplined DevOps point of view we of course promote a Holistic Enterprise scoping strategy. Whatever scoping strategy you choose your release management strategy will need to be able to support the scaling situations faced by your delivery teams. This includes teams of various sizes, different levels of geographic distribution, dealing with different levels of domain and technical complexity, teams that are organizationally distributed, and teams in compliance situations.

There are three strategies to consider for organizing your release management team:

1. Operations led. In many small to medium-sized organizations release management is one of many activities that are performed by the operations team. With this approach a “release team”, in some cases an individual, is put together to release a solution on a project-by-project basis. Although there is often a hand-off point from the development team to the operations team, the operations team may require several members of the development team to be actively involved with the deployment. The advantages of having operations manage releases are that they are very familiar with the current state of your production environment and they know what other releases are happening in parallel (if any) and thereby have an integrated view of the overall situation. The primary disadvantage is that they will not know the intricacies of the new release of the solution, hence the need to include development team members.
2. Separate release team. Larger organizations will often have an explicit release management team, often a subgroup of their operations department. The advantages of a separate team include the ability to grow expertise in release management, familiarity with your production environment, and the ability to manage releases in an integrated manner. The disadvantages are the lack of familiarity with solution(s) being released and the potential to inject overhead into the overall release process.
3. Delivery team led. This approach is common in very small organizations that do not have separate operations teams and in organizations delivery teams have adopted at very disciplined approach to DevOps that supports the practice of continuous deployment. The advantages of a delivery team approach are that that team is very familiar with how the solution is built and they are given greater flexibility to deploy as needed into production. The disadvantages are that there is a risk of deployment collisions in multi-team environments and integration problems in production between disparate systems. Luckily these disadvantages can be addressed via a combination of development-oriented DevOps practices and the following release management practices.