Without a mechanism to check, any process can go haywire. The focus of release management is the protection of the live IT environment and its services through the use of formal procedures and checks.

Goals

As the name implies, no software or hardware is released without undergoing a rigorous testing phase. Quality control, during the development and implementation of new hardware and software, is also a prime responsibility of release management.

In specific, the following are the goals of release management:

• Plan and oversee
• Design and implement procedures for the distribution and installation of changes to IT systems
• Communicate and manage expectations of the customer during the planning and rollout of new releases
• Control changes
• Audits – before and after trial
• Distribution

• Major software release and hardware upgrades, usually containing large areas of new functionality
• Minor software releases and hardware upgrades, usually containing small enhancements and fixes
• Emergency software and hardware fixes, usually containing the corrections to a small number of known problems

On the basis of the unit, releases can be categorized thus:

• Delta release: This is a release of only that part of software that has been changed (for instance, security patches to plug bugs in a software)
• Full release: This means the entire software program will be released again (for instance, an entire version of an application)
• Packaged release: This is a combination of many changes (for instance, an Operating System image containing the applications as well).