Understanding Why Release Management is So Challenging

Before we start discussing the release management challenges, it is important to clarify here that a release can mean different things to different teams. Releasing software in DevOps means making software or a feature available to the end users. This release could be public or to a limited group depending on the type of deployment (e.g., canary, blue/green, etc.). On the other hand, some teams refer to releasing software as making it available to the operations team. The step of moving software from dev to the ops cycle is usually called a deployment in the DevOps world.

While these are minor differences, for sanity, we will be using DevOps-friendly terminology, considering deployment as a stage that comes before the release. This distinction also provides more flexibility in the management of software, as at times, even technically ready software needs a business go-ahead to be made available to the end users. The demarcation between deployment and release stages helps decision-makers align their releases better with business objectives, marketing plans, competitive landscape, and more.

Inability to Track and Reduce Lead Times

Today most organizations and software teams understand the value of faster feedback loops. Quick customer feedback allows teams to make timely changes and prevent large-scale failures. However, delivery leaders usually see large lead times without contextual details into what’s causing delays. It is not easy for them to figure out the bottlenecks in their processes or identify which stages in the delivery cycle are causing maximum delays. At times, a bloated release scope can lead to delays. Long QA cycles, higher deployment times, and vulnerability issues detected towards the end also lead to delays. Moreover, there are cases where deployment frequency is higher, but the code sits for months before it gets approvals from other enterprise teams to go live. In such cases, complacency can set it over a period with development teams taking their sweet time as they don’t expect the code to be released on time anyway. This further reduces release frequency and leads to higher revenue losses as faster customer feedback becomes near impossible.

Inability to Manage Blockers

Another major challenge comes in the form of blockers or the number of blocked user stories across different planned releases. Blockers can arise due to various reasons, as there are multiple handoffs and dependencies between different teams. Even if the teams work efficiently, they may have decided on different priorities for their work, which can cause delays. Teams working with different velocities can also lead to inefficiencies. Project managers often lack data-driven visibility into blockers and their underlying reasons and have to spend several crucial hours understanding and resolving the blockages.

Continuous Compliance Challenges

While teams continue to chase higher velocity, many times, a significant amount of work is completed just before a deadline. Many changes are approved without following the best practices and guidelines. Though project managers and team leads have to make quick decisions, such deviations also increase exposure to vulnerabilities and bugs in the production environment. Also, delivery leaders rarely have the bandwidth to track every commit, pull request (PR), and peer approval manually. There’s no way for them to tell if the teams have used the pre-defined tools and procedures for version control, source code management, peer reviews, etc. As a result, delivery leaders have poor visibility into risks and compliance across projects. The inability to enforce and track compliance in CI/CD often proves to be costly.

Reporting Challenges

People responsible for handling releases and deliveries often collaborate with cross-functional teams while reporting to senior managers and CXOs. They need to keep track of multiple projects, closely monitor major blockers and delivery dates, and clearly assess deviations from the delivery schedules. All this becomes increasingly complex with scale. One has to refer to different sources of data like QA results, quality scans, security scans, error budgets, etc., that are critical to approve a release. However, organizations often lack a unified dashboard that captures all these data points for end-to-end visibility and quick decision-making. Introducing new tools or metrics to the existing reporting setup is often cumbersome. There is also significant manual work involved in converting development KPIs into metrics and reports that are easily understood by business decision-makers.

A straightforward way to solve release management challenges is to unify data and insights. As discussed above, most of the release management challenges arise due to a lack of integration and automation across tools. Delivery leaders often struggle to compile and analyze data from different tools to get a quick overview of their projects and assess release readiness. Gathr helps teams solve such challenges with simple no-code solutions that require minimal configuration and implementation overheads. For instance, it offers an out-of-the-box app to expedite release go/no decisions. The app offers you a quick overview of all projects with their average risk scores and identifies how many projects are approved, at risk, or blocked. You can also drill down to project details like their code coverage, the number of defects across projects, their distribution by severity, and their breakdown by different stages of the release cycle.

Gathr also offers several simple apps to track lead time, blockers, development and quality metrics, and more to help you stay on top of your projects.