Release Management Old and New: Enabling Continuous Delivery and Staged Delivery within a Common Process

Many forward-thinking enterprise IT organizations worldwide are adopting today’s popular Agile philosophy. With the advent of iterative development methodologies, organizations are quickly delivering applications that meet requirements and are well tested prior to production. This is a key business driver that IT must deliver. While possessing an Agile application development environment is considered to be mission-critical, this methodology cannot alone deliver applications into production.

To keep pace with the increased demand to move changes into production that an Agile development creates, many companies are now implementing a Continuous Delivery method. With Continuous Delivery, enterprise IT teams can both develop and test application changes faster. They also have the changes moved into production at a much earlier date.

But, not all applications need be nor can be delivered via Continuous Delivery. Many applications will and should still be delivered using the traditional stage-gate delivery methodology.

A new practice that is taking shape today is a two-pronged approach to deliver some application changes via Continuous Delivery and others via stage-gate delivery. To best support this hybrid application delivery environment, the release management process must be flexible enough to support both delivery methodologies, flexible enough to support multiple platforms, including mainframe and distributed systems.

In this engaging discussion led by Jeff Westenhaver of Serena Software, he will present how IT organizations can greatly improve business availability and also reduce risk in an Agile IT environment. Jeff will share best practices for streamlining release management processes to make the business more available and at lower cost.

Key Takeaways Include:

Those attending this session will learn:

• How to support traditional application delivery stage-gate methodology while implementing continuous delivery;
• How to get applications faster to market while driving down IT costs;
• Bringing development and operations together to improve release management;
• Hear release management real-life success stories from Fortune 500 companies.