Release Management Deployment

[Debbie]

Hi,
We are currently implementing release management in our company. Do most companies set up the release management process to control the move from dev to test to stage to prodcution or just the deployement to prodcution?

Also, do all applicaitons go through an enterprise wide release or just critical, large, SOX, etc. applications? Smaller applications would still follow the process, but just get deployed at a system/application level rather than the "big" release?

Thanks

[Ziad]

I do not know what is the common practice, but the best practice (that's ITIL) is to have them all under Release Management IF THIS IS CONVENIENT for your organization.

Nothing forbids from having the development team do whatever they like (without following any process) during the development, testing and staging and deliver a tested version to be deployed under Release Management.

Regards,
Z!

[blamblam]

You have to consider carefully the size of your organisation against the objectives that you are trying to achieve with the implementation of a Release Management process.

From my perspective, you need to determine the scope of your Release Management. I.e. Should all applications and infrastructure be subject to Release Management? Or perhaps only critical systems and infrastructure? Once you've established that, all changes to those services will be subject to Release Managament, regardless of size... even the smallest change could ripple into something bigger if not developed and tested properly.

Determining how you Release changes into production is also important to consider. The advantage of a good Release Management process is that you can package the Changes into a single Release, thereby minimising unavailability of the service affected by the Change.

A good Release Management process is vital where you have a SOA environment as the dependencies between applications and infrastructure are often blurred and many different parts of the organisation could be affected if you get it wrong.