As anyone who has ever played the game Telephone knows, miscommunications often happen, leading to a very different and usually more hilarious outcome than expected. Miscommunication in the DevOps world isn’t quite so funny. Spreadsheets and emails are the virtual equivalent of Telephone when putting out releases. Visualization of the Release schedule, progress and readiness is vital to seamless, timely delivery.
As the industry becomes more Agile and moves to smaller and more frequent releases, it becomes imperative to have coordination of those releases and amongst the different teams involved. Smaller and more frequent doesn’t equate to easier to manage, as any parent of small children knows. Releases are complex, often involving multiple applications with dependencies, different technologies, and shared and potentially conflicting resources. To solve this problem, Release Automation Continuous Delivery Edition introduced an exciting new feature, Release Tracks in the 6.3 version.
Release Tracks enable you to coordinate multiple releases into the same production delivery—providing a visual way to manage amongst all of the key stakeholders for any given release. Release Managers or release owners can create new tracks that map to their release cadence, be it daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly. They can set production timelines, and create required milestones such as code freezes or integration or performance testing.
As Release Managers add releases to a track, their progress is tracked and everyone can see where they are in the process. Business Analysts, PM and Product Owners, along with Release Managers can then make a decision on whether a specific release is going to make the track date and what the impact will be. Release tracks also add an additional layer of governance with a baked in approval process for Production deployments. The key benefits of Release Tracks are the ability to assess release readiness much earlier in the cycle, and improved communication and coordination among teams.
In an Agile world, Product Managers, Product Owners and Business Analysts work together to determine the content and timeline of each new release. Release Managers and Operations teams, along with Dev and QA application teams work together to build the content and deliver to production. The ultimate goal is to provide rapid and reliable business value to consumers, and Release Tracks are a major step on the DevOps journey.
See a short demo here!
https://communities.ca.com/videos/5183