Agile software release management focuses on continuous development and deployment. Where traditional release planning is focused around a versioned release of a product that might only happen a few times a year, Agile releases are incremental and happen frequently. Today we take a closer look at software release management and what your team can do to ensure smooth continuous delivery to your customers.

What are the Core Responsibilities of Release Management in Agile?

The main responsibility of the person overseeing Agile release management is to ensure that quality software is released on time. For most projects that means focusing on organizing sprints or iterations and their corresponding features into logical sets of functionality that can be released at a specific time and documenting the details in a release plan. 

For some teams, a release plan takes the form of an actual document that lays out timelines, quality bars, and release criteria. Other teams will leverage sprint tracking tools like Assembla to link work items to releases and carefully track risks alongside other work items within their agile project management software.

A release manager must consider feature dependencies, downstream impacts, and how updates will impact the user experience when deciding which features to include in each release. They must also track development and QA progress and partner with operations teams to make sure they are prepared for rolling out the updates. 

Since any of these teams may run into issues, risk management is also a key responsibility of Agile software release management. Tracking risks and communicating with all of the impacted stakeholders ensures everyone is on the same page and working together to mitigate any risk factors.

How to Handle Release Planning in Agile?

Risks are inevitable so you should take care upfront to think through how your teams will assess risks and make decisions when issues are encountered. Agile governance is the framework and processes to ensure effective management and oversight of Agile projects. The key to Agile governance is communication and collaboration.

Rather than having strict escalation processes that work through hierarchies of approvals, Agile governance relies on teams quickly raising concerns and working together to find a solution. While it’s important to still have a defined process so teams understand what to do when they encounter issues, Agile governance is also flexible and prioritizes finding the right solution over following the process exactly as it’s defined.

Flexibility doesn’t mean that processes aren’t well-defined and documented though. In fact, stability and having a repeatable process are keys to successful governance and release management. Agile emphasizes continuous improvement, but these changes should be done incrementally with defined success measures so that instability isn’t introduced to your product or processes.

Best Practices for IT Release Management and Agile Teams

Your software release management team needs insights into not only the product backlog but also the release pipeline to track progress and maintain stability. Real-time monitoring and reporting allow release management to be quickly alerted to issues and help development teams narrow down the root cause.

Using CI/CD pipelines, you can automate your release workflows. With tools like Jenkins and Travis CI, you can automate unit tests, merge requests between branches and into main, the delivery of changes to testing and staging environments, and deployment to production. 

If there are any failures along the way, CI/CD tools will automatically open bugs, leave merge request comments, and generate logs and reports that include details such as what part of the pipeline failed, compilation errors, test failures, and dependency issues.

An automated pipeline gives developers control over the end to end process without sacrificing quality or causing unnecessary overhead. To learn more about CI/CD check out Continuous Delivery, Deployment & Integration: Key Definitions or to learn how to leverage Travis CI and Assembla, see How to Build and Test Code From Your Assembla Repos.

Using CI/CD tools that integrate with your project management tools give you the added benefit of seeing across your development and release process in a single view. With Assembla dashboards and reporting you can track release velocity, pinpoint bottlenecks, and monitor the status of bugs found before and after release. 

What are the Common Pitfalls in Release Management and How to Avoid Them?

Project management pitfalls can have downstream impacts on release management, so a strong partnership between the two is beneficial. Planning large releases or holding releases until an Epic is complete is a common pitfall. It’s important to break requirements down into Stories that encompass a feature from the user’s point of view that still fits within a given sprint. If done correctly the features should be ready to release at the end of the sprint. For a deeper look at how to break down your planning—and how to do it with Assembla—see Getting Started with Agile IT Project Management on Assembla.

Of course, sometimes features are large and require multiple sprints or they have dependencies on other areas. For frequently changing projects with multiple dependencies, environment drift is another area to monitor. Environment drift, sometimes called configuration drift, is when versioned components become out of sync.

In cases where you have multiple environments that need to be kept in sync, it’s best practice to map out all the component dependencies to determine if code changes need to be released at the same time or sequentially and then carefully track their progress through the different environments. Having strong branching strategies will make this task easier.

At the code level, feature toggles are a great way to introduce code changes and enable early testing, without exposing partially completed features to end users. Following source control collaboration best practices will also help keep your code clean and up to date, reducing the need to troubleshoot merge conflicts.

Agile Software Release Management with Assembla

Assembla has a wide variety of flexible and customizable Agile development tools to help your team plan and track their projects from the ideation phase through release and post-release. If you’re ready to try our cloud-based version control and project management platform, start a free 14 day trial of Assembla. Our team would love to talk with you about how Assembla can meet your Agile software release needs.