Software Release Management Evolution - Comparative Analysis across Agile and DevOps Continuous Delivery

Samer I. Mohamed

Continuous delivery, operational excellence, Software Release management, agile approach, DevOps.

Software release management is the process of managing, planning, scheduling and controlling a software build through different stages and environments; including testing and deploying software releases. Traditional approaches like ad-hoc and incremental/iterative approaches prove not to satisfy the current demanding clients or IT business. Thus a need for new techniques arise like agile software development, DevOps continuous delivery. DevOps and Agile complement each other to deploy working functionality into production faster. The main goal of Continuous Delivery and DevOps is to release more reliable applications faster and more frequently to satisfy the client and business needs. This paper sheds a light on the evolution of the software release management starting from traditional techniques towards agile and continuous delivery via DevOps. Analytical case study will prove how new software release managements techniques succeeded to bridge the gap of traditional techniques both in time to market and quality efficiency to fulfil the IT business needs.