Managing releases
The release management features provide comprehensive tools that help you manage, audit and coordinate simple and complex releases. You can fully customize the activities in a release job plan to ensure that tasks are completed in the right order by the right people.
- Release management overview
Release management provides a wide range of applications and procedures for planning, designing, building, deploying, and testing releases in your data center. A flexible user interface enables you to create, assign, monitor, notify, and report the status of release tasks, leveraging a best-practice ITIL process. - Planning and managing a release
During the planning and managing phase, your primary goal is to develop an overall release structure, add the appropriate approved changes, and identify configuration item (CI) relationships and dependencies. Throughout the release process, you can view process details and monitor overall progress. - Designing and building a release
During this release phase, you design and build an installable unit of software, called a software image. The installation scripts and packages to be deployed are designed and created. You do not create software, but rather package the software for deployment. You also create installation scripts and mechanisms, communication and education plans, and backout procedures. - Testing and accepting a release
At the Testing and Accepting phase of a release, the release package is tested and reviewed, and copies of the package are added to the Definitive Media Library. - Planning a rollout
During the Plan Rollout phase of a release, you create a series of tasks that represent each of the unique rollouts that are to be accomplished for the release. For example, a release might involve two source configuration items (CIs) to 20 target CIs across three sites. Each individual rollout must be defined as a task in the release work plan. - Communicating and preparing a release
At this stage of the release, stakeholders, users, and others are briefed about the release. In addition, any needed site preparation and user education takes place.