Software Product Management

Software Release Management Essentials Virtual Event: Part of the CM Crossroads online event series

As part of the CM Crossroads online event series, the Software Release Management Essentials virtual event is set to deliver 4 hours of on-topic discussions for and by release management professionals. It will all take place live Aug 18th beginning at 9 AM Pacific and will be availalbe on-demand throughout the year.

Software Release Management (RM) is a core Configuration Management (CM) function. Many people refer to Release Management to cover all of the really important aspects of CM, including build engineering, continuous integration, release packaging and deployment. Many Release Managers fulfill a technical Project Management role of coordinating all of the key requirements for a release to be successfully packaged and deployed. I have also heard technology managers refer to the “RM” as being the conductor of the technology orchestra with both diverse technical and business related responsibilities. To be successful as an RM, you may want to get yourself a sharp looking cape and start practicing to leap tall buildings with a single bound.

During this 4 hour virtual event attendees will be able to engage in real-time discussions with software release management experts and thought leaders in the CM Crossroads virtual event center and participate in 4 hours of lively webinar sessions on the topic of release management.

The day will be kicked off with a keynote panel discussion led by Bob Aiello, the editor in Chief of CM Crossroads with Jeffrey Fredrick, Technical Evangelist, Urbancode, Inc., and
Anders Wallgren, Chief Technical Officer, Electric Cloud. The discussion will be led by questions from the audience and posed to the group or the individual panelists.

Next the the topic moves to ITIL Release Management and Automation where Jeffrey Fredrick asks the tough questions; How confident are you with the content of what you are about to release? Do you know every change since the last release? Can you reproduce the release at will? Many of the teams we meet struggle with these fundamental issues of Software Configuration Management.

The most successful teams solve these problems by leveraging a binary repository or — in ITIL terminology — a Definitive Software Library (DSL). By providing an authoritative source for release artifacts, a well-managed binary repository can help address issues of compliance, traceability, and audit. Combined with dependency management, a binary repository provides a valuable starting point for impact and risk analysis.

But the benefit of using a binary repository is also felt earlier in the software-development lifecycle: By enabling effective component-based development, a binary repository can enable faster build times, facilitate more efficient collaboration between teams, and reduce the learning curve for new developers.

For software-configuration-management professionals who are concerned with audits or improving the efficiency of the software-development lifecycle, Eric Minick and Jeffrey Fredrick invite you to join them for this presentation where they will address:

• traditional approaches to controlling binary artifacts, including their shortcomings;
• essential elements of well-managed binary repository and inter-project dependency management; as well as
• patterns for adopting a binary repository and implementing dependency management.

After a short break, Anders Wallgren and Bob Aiello shift the discussion to Seven Things to Let Go of Before You Release. During this session we directly address the question, what’s the essence of release management?

Deliberate, methodical, organized software production processes designed to “turn the crank” as quickly and as efficiently as possible. This presentation is a survey of the seven most common antipatterns we’ve seen that plague release teams. They include:

• The Automated System is Waiting For You (perils of pseudo-automation)
• It Only Takes A Night (slow, serialized release processes)
• Scotty’s The Build Guy, So Scotty Runs the Build (not abstracting the release environment)
• Everyone Does it Their Way, That Way No One’s Happy (confusing uniformity with homology)

For each of the seven, we’ll explore how they grew from simple, well-intentioned shortcuts into serious process bottlenecks that gate growth and productivity. We’ll discuss why they are so dangerous, and most importantly, what you can do to eliminate them, at process, team, and tool levels.

Then Clyde Louge and Bob Aiello will wrap up the conversation with a discussion on Bridging the DevOps Gap.

In many enterprises, the distance between development and operations has grown wider with the adoption of Agile and Iterative development methodologies. This gap is particularly acute in the area of deployment and release, which has been recently termed the “DevOps Gap”.  This gap can be bridged by a combination of better processes and tools for supporting planning, coordination and automation of DevOps activities.  Learn about the value of forging a better DevOps linkage and how you can deliver more application changes with lower risk.

The CM Crossroads Online Event Series features regular multi-hour virtual events focused on a specific topic within the Application Lifecycle Management industry. Each virtual event will deliver panel discussions and presentations by industry thought leaders targeted to the focus of the event. The online event series is available online at http://www.cmcrossroads.com/events/online-event-series

About the Author

Founder and publisher for CM Crossroads the largest social networking community and resource center for Configuration Management and ALM topics.

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