What Problems Does DevOps Release Management Try to Solve?

A conventional IT organization has extremely long development cycles by today’s standards. In these antiquated companies, capacious amounts of manual testing must usually occur prior to a software product being released to production. What’s more, any time there’s a code change, it can cause a remarkable amount of stress on the stakeholders involved. While working in organizations such as these, development teams typically wait for clean environments to be provisioned or they must wait for approval prior to making any changes at all. Additionally, quality assurance (QA) teams might be waiting for developers to finish their work before it is ready for testing. All of this waiting results in low deployment frequency (DF) and high lead time for changes (LTFC).

Furthermore, in traditional IT organizations, many team members drop off after a project is finished, leaving little documentation behind and zero...

Exploring automated testing, deployment, and change management

When it comes to the creation of software, most modern organizations must contend with a couple of significant obstacles: deploying software quickly and innovating at scale. The DevOps approach aims to address these challenges by implementing automation across the whole software development life cycle (SDLC), with the goal of expediting the delivery of software that is both dependable and secure.

By merging automated testing, automated deployment, and automated change management, DevOps release management paves the way for operations teams to automate release planning. It is considerably simpler to manage and deliver successful releases when using automation since it makes release management an easily reproducible, repeatable process. This is achieved by implementing well-crafted continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines that are interoperable throughout your organization, but it is just as important...

Reducing potential risks and accelerating the release of software products

The software delivery process is facilitated by excellent communication, coordination, and productivity thanks to DevOps release management. Collaboration tools such as Slack, MS Teams, Jira, Confluence, ClickUp, Asana, and many other technologies facilitate superior communication, and this is important because collaboration between groups occurs across vast distances and time zones in our contemporary global economy.

The typical implementation of the DevOps release management approach involves established methodologies such as CI/CD and deployment automation, substantially expediting the development of high-quality software while mitigating potential risks. Consequently, these factors enable enterprises to promptly adapt to market fluctuations and meet consumer demands with greater efficiency.

Among the several areas where DevOps practices have proven to be particularly useful is disaster recovery (DR...

Streamlining the release process so that it becomes standardized

By incorporating release management into existing DevOps workflows, the release process can be simplified and eventually standardized. It establishes a precedent for company procedures to be repeated in a uniform way. It is advised that you record your CI/CD pipeline results in a release log and aggregate them into your release management issue tracking products, source control management, and related tooling. After a system has been deployed, this documentation is essential for tracing the origins of issues and applying appropriate solutions.

The term release pipeline refers to the collection of automated and manual processes used to guarantee that customers have access to a stable and safe build of a company’s software product. The duties and responsibilities of a release pipeline are to ensure that product enhancements are quickly and safely delivered to end users, beginning with changes to source code that...

Improving metrics and KPIs for successful releases

By setting standards, DevOps release management aids in the development of superior software releases. With the use of automation, version control, and quality control (QC), development teams can gain insight into metrics that are needed to produce more frequent releases with a lower failure rate.

It is just as true with DevOps as it is with anything else that you cannot improve what you cannot measure. DevOps performs best when teams collect, analyze, and measure a wide variety of data in order to deliver on the promise of faster, higher-quality product delivery. These DevOps metrics supply the critical information needed for DevOps teams to gain command of the SDLC. Metrics used in DevOps software development highlight the pipeline’s efficiency and allow for the prompt elimination of any obstacles that prevent progress. These metrics can be used to monitor technical competency as well as operational efficiency.

The primary...

Summary

Understanding what problems DevOps release management was designed to solve is crucial before you can expect to wield it effectively. After reading this chapter, you should have a baseline knowledge of many key aspects of the DevOps life cycle. You now understand the importance of incorporating automation techniques for testing, deployment, and change management. Further, you learned about strategies that reduce potential risks and accelerate the release of software products, using release pipelines. Also, you now understand what steps are needed to streamline the release process in a standardized way. Finally, you have the foundational knowledge that is needed to improve metrics and KPIs for successful releases and customer happiness.

In the next chapter, you’ll learn about the essence of what makes DevOps release management unique compared to other release management models. By learning the DevOps release management philosophy, you’ll understand the key differences...

Questions

Answer the following questions to test your knowledge of this chapter:

1. What is the distinction between continuous deployment and continuous release?
2. What are audit trials, and what are their benefit?
3. What is the most appropriate stage for automated testing within the context of a DevOps release management life cycle?
4. How should the change approval process be handled within the context of a DevOps release management approach?
5. What does a release pipeline do?
6. How can you incorporate a DR strategy within the context of a DevOps release management approach?
7. How do ITSM tools automate change management?
8. What are the four DORA metrics?
9. What is the best way to incorporate data from release logs within the context of a DevOps release management approach?
10. If there were one DevOps metric that was most important, which one would that be?