1. Release Management- A Smooth Version Control System
Technology and processes today increasingly drive business. As the world evolves, so do the business
requirements. The need to get the right infrastructure and processes and adapt them to the changing
requirements is the most crucial part of any business strategy. Service providers usually align the IT
infrastructure with the overall business strategy of a company and try to offer a consistent and high
quality service through improved and upgraded processes and systems. However, a good service
management practice is required to improve the evolution process without affecting quality standards.
Release Management is a process of the transition phase, which assists the service organizations, the
evolution of their environment in response to changing business requirements. This process plans and
manages the release of new and updated business services to customers, taking into consideration all
technical and non-technical elements of a release. The proper management of releases ensures minimal
disruption of services, communication, accessibility of all elements involved, without sacrificing on the
service quality standards. A request for change in such an environment triggers off a number of related
processes, such as assessment, development, testing, deployment, audit and closure.
Release management or version management involves maintaining and tracking different versions of
the project deliverables. It keeps note of the requirements of the project, planned and schedule task,
bugs detected, actual release and planned release as well as changes during each release. By
automating the release notes, reduces the manual effort required. This process is applicable for any
project developed and not just software development.
The development of technology has paved way for the development of a number of version control
system. Subversion management is an Open source version control system, which is used by most
software developers to track the changes and evolution in the source code. Being tightly integrated into
the Application lifecycle management (ALM), Subversion can create shared repositories and launch
projects in seconds, access configuration at both project and directory level, browse the repositories for
file changes, histories, and associate changes with the issues for easy traceability and process
enforcement.
Beginning with change requests in the development cycle, release management oversees the
development, testing, deployment and support of software versions. With a set of characteristics such
as customizable properties, lifecycles driven by workflows, ability to be associated with other
components of application lifecycle management the versions are very powerful entities.
Know More on:
Distributed version control system
Requirement management software