Release Management Guide: What It Is & Why It Matters

The pressure is on for software development teams. Companies, leadership, and customers want high-quality, reliable applications at breakneck speeds. However, that doesn’t happen by accident—you’ll need a release management process you can trust to deliver at scale.

Release management encompasses how you deliver new features, bug fixes, and improvements to your customers. It’s all about efficient delivery with minimal disruption, but that’s often easier said than done (especially with outdated release management practices).

Below, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about modern release management to transform the way your teams manage (and deliver) software releases.

What is release management?

Release management helps bring together all the moving parts of your software project to deliver value to end-users. The software development lifecycle (SDLC) provides a structured approach to software development, and release management helps push this software to customers. 

Once, this was through more traditional, infrequent “big bang” releases, but now modern release management practices emphasize more frequent, smaller releases through continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

The software development process typically consists of the following stages:

1. Planning: Defining the project scope, objectives, and requirements.
2. Design: Creating the software architecture and design specifications.
3. Development: Writing the actual code based on the design specifications.
4. Testing: Verifying that the software works as intended and meets quality standards.
5. Deployment: Moving code artifacts to the production environment without releasing to end users.
6. Testing in production: Validating code in the live production environment with a subset of users (such as canary testing with internal developers).
7. Release: Rolling out the code artifacts gradually to all intended users through progressive delivery.
8. Maintenance: Providing ongoing support, monitoring feature performance, and making quick adjustments using feature flags as needed.

Release management isn’t confined to a single stage of the SDLC—it spans across multiple stages to better coordinate the entire process. Here's how release management integrates with each stage:

• Planning: Release managers work with product owners and stakeholders to define release schedules and prioritize features for upcoming releases.
• Design and Development: They coordinate with development teams to guarantee features are being developed in line with release plans.
• Testing: Release management oversees the various testing phases to check that all necessary tests are completed before a release is approved.
• Deployment: Coordinates the actual release process to guarantee smooth deployment management.
• Maintenance: Post-release, release managers monitor the new version’s performance and coordinate any necessary hotfixes or patches for quality assurance.

The importance of release management

It doesn’t matter how quickly you produce software if it doesn’t reach end-users efficiently and reliably. Here’s why release management needs to be a focus for every software development team:

• Accelerates time-to-market: Streamlines the delivery process to help your company respond quickly to market demands and user needs.
• Enhances software quality: Reduces bugs and maintains consistent performance across different environments.
• Managing risks: Provides mechanisms for thorough testing (like a testing environment), gradual rollouts, and quick rollbacks.
• Improves collaboration: Serves as a bridge between different operations teams for better coordination.
• Increases visibility and predictability: Produces better insight into upcoming releases for more accurate resource allocation and planning.
• Optimizes resources: Reduces downtime, minimizes emergency fixes, and allows for more efficient use of development and operations resources.
• Supports scalability: Provides consistent methodologies that can handle increasing release frequencies across multiple products and teams.
• Boosts customer satisfaction: Helps your software engineering teams deliver new features more frequently without compromising the software experience.
• Enables continuous improvement: Provides a framework for gathering metrics, gaining insights, and continuously refining the delivery process.

Release management isn’t just a technical process—it’s a strategic initiative that directly impacts your business’s innovation, customer satisfaction, and competitive edge.

Progressive delivery: A modern approach to release management

Progressive delivery is an advanced release management strategy that lets your team release new features to users gradually and in a controlled manner. Traditional release management typically relies on "all-or-nothing" deployments, but progressive delivery uses the following features to give you more control over new software releases:

• Feature flags: These allow developers to turn features on or off without deploying new code.
• Gradual rollouts: New features are released to a small subset of users initially before gradually expanding to the entire user base.
• Targeted releases: Features can be released to specific user segments based on criteria like geography, user type, or custom attributes.
• Real-time monitoring: Real-time monitoring of key metrics during rollouts helps your teams quickly identify and respond to any issues.
• Automated rollbacks: If problems are detected, features can be automatically disabled or rolled back without requiring a full system rollback.

How to achieve better release management

Effective release management doesn’t just happen. It takes time, intention, and commitment. However, it’s well worth the investment. Here are a few strategies and best practices you can implement to improve your release and project management processes.

1. Adopt automation

Automation is the gateway to successful release management. The more you can automate (reliably), the better you can reduce repetitive tasks, minimize human error, speed up processes, and free your team to focus on higher-value activities.

Implement CI/CD pipelines to automate build, test, and deployment processes. Use infrastructure-as-code tools (like Terraform or Ansible) to maintain consistent environments across all stages of your pipeline. Automate release notes generation and stakeholder communications to keep everyone informed without manual effort.

2. Use feature flags

Feature flags let you decouple deployments from releases for more control over your feature rollouts.

Implement a feature flag management system to enable gradual rollouts, A/B testing, and quick rollbacks. Integrate feature flags into your development workflow to help teams deploy code to production that isn't yet ready for all users. This reduces risk and provides more flexibility in managing features.

3. Implement better testing strategies

Comprehensive testing helps you maintain high-quality releases and catch issues before they reach users.

• Incorporate automated testing at all levels: unit, integration, and end-to-end. 
• Use canary releases to test new functionalities with a small subset of users before full rollout to gather real-world feedback and performance data. 
• Consider implementing chaos engineering practices to proactively identify system weaknesses.

4. Improve monitoring and observability

Real-time insights into your systems' performance and behavior help you identify and address issues quickly.

• Set up comprehensive monitoring for all critical systems and applications. 
• Implement distributed tracing to understand system behavior and performance across complex, distributed architectures. 
• Leverage AI-powered analytics to detect anomalies and predict potential issues before they impact users.

5. Streamline communication and collaboration

Use collaborative tools to keep all stakeholders informed about release status and changes. Implement ChatOps to bring release management discussions into team chat platforms for faster decision-making and information sharing. Conduct regular cross-functional meetings to align on release goals and priorities to keep everyone on the same page.

6. Standardize and document processes

A high-quality release management workflow should be a business process—not an accident. Create comprehensive, documented release management procedures and checklists. Standardize your release naming conventions and versioning strategies to maintain clarity across your organization. Maintain a detailed release calendar that’s accessible to all stakeholders for visibility into upcoming releases and major milestones.

7. Focus on continuous improvement

Your release management isn’t a one-and-done plan—you should continue refining your processes over time. Regularly conduct post-mortem reviews after each release to identify areas for improvement. 

Track developer operations performance indicators like deployment frequency, lead time, and change failure rate to measure the quality of your processes.

8. Implement progressive delivery

Adopt a gradual rollout strategy for new features—this will let you monitor performance and gather feedback before full deployment. 

Use targeted releases to test features with specific user segments. Implement automated rollback mechanisms to help you quickly recover from issues and minimize the impact of problematic releases.

9. Leverage cloud-native technologies

Cloud-native technologies provide flexibility and scalability for modern release management. Use containerization and orchestration tools like Docker and Kubernetes for more flexible and scalable deployments. Implement serverless architectures (where appropriate) to reduce operational overhead and improve scalability.

10. Invest in the right tools

Choose a robust release management tool that integrates well with your existing tech stack. Implement a feature management platform (like LaunchDarkly) for progressive delivery and better control over feature releases.

How to evaluate your release management processes

Once you’ve built your release management processes, it’s time to benchmark, optimize, evaluate, and repeat. This helps to continuously improve your release management and keep it aligned with organizational goals.

Establish key performance indicators (KPIs)

Start by defining metrics that measure the effectiveness of your release management. DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics are a great place to start:

• Deployment frequency: How often do you deploy to production?
• Lead time for changes: How long does it take from code commit to production deployment?
• Change failure rate: What percentage of deployments cause failures in production?
• Mean time to recovery (MTTR): How quickly can you recover from failures?

You might also look at:

• Release cycle time: How long does your entire release process take?
• Customer satisfaction scores: How do releases impact user experience?

Perform a release management maturity assessment

Evaluate your processes against industry best practices and maturity models:

• Assess your current practices in areas like automation, testing, monitoring, and collaboration
• Identify gaps between your current state and desired maturity level
• Create a roadmap for advancing your maturity in key areas

Consider using established models like the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) for benchmarking.

Review documentation and knowledge sharing

Examine the quality and accessibility of your release management documentation:

• Is your release process clearly documented and up-to-date?
• Are roles and responsibilities well-defined?
• Is there a system for capturing and sharing lessons learned?
• How effectively is knowledge transferred across team members?

Keep your documentation comprehensive, accessible, and regularly updated.

Gather and analyze user feedback

Ultimately, your release management processes impact your end-users. Listening to them will help you understand how well you’re doing:

• Analyze user feedback and support tickets following releases
• Monitor app store ratings and reviews (for mobile applications)
• Conduct user surveys to gauge satisfaction with new features and updates
• Perform acceptance testing with beta testing and end-user testing

Improve your release management processes with LaunchDarkly

Developing a basic release management process, implementing progressive delivery, continuously improving your software delivery pipeline—it’s a lot to do. Fortunately, you don’t have to do it alone. LaunchDarkly provides the solutions you need to transform your release processes:

• Feature flags for controlled rollouts: LaunchDarkly's change management platform allows you to decouple deployment from release. You can deploy code to production and control its availability with the flip of a switch.
• Progressive delivery made easy: Gradually release features to a subset of users, conduct A/B tests, and perform canary releases to gather real-world feedback before full deployment.
• Real-time monitoring and control: LaunchDarkly provides real-time metrics and logs to help you monitor the impact of your releases and make data-driven decisions.
• Cross-functional collaboration: LaunchDarkly bridges the gap between development, IT operations, and business teams with a centralized platform for managing feature releases.
• Rapid iteration and experimentation: Quickly test new ideas, gather feedback, and iterate on features without the need for redeployment.
• Integration: LaunchDarkly integrates with your existing CI/CD pipeline and development tools to improve your current processes (rather than disrupting them).

Start your free trial of LaunchDarkly today and see firsthand how feature flags can transform your release management process.