Learning about Release Management
BMC Helix ITSM: Smart IT provides capabilities for planning, building, testing, and deploying controlled releases into your IT environment. Consider using release management to implement or deploy an application or a software on a large scale across the company. A release is a collection of related authorized changes to an IT service that are tested and introduced together into the live environment. Smart IT provides a simple release-tracking interface that is simple to learn and use, collaborative, and available on mobile devices. This topic describes how release managers, release coordinators, and the change advisory board in your organization can use Smart IT to create release requests and manage them throughout their lifecycle.
Process overview
The following diagram illustrates the release management process:
Smart IT helps you manage release requests through the following milestones:
Initiate
The Create Release wizard in Smart IT helps you enter the essential information about the release. Some fields are filled in automatically for you, even if you do not use a template. For example, the system assumes that you are requesting the release for yourself, and the company and location information defaults to your company and location. If you have the role of Change Coordinator in your support group, you are automatically assigned as the change coordinator for the change request. If you use a template, values in the template take precedence over system defaults.
When the release must be divided into several changes and activities, you can create and schedule these in a release manifest. A manifest provides a consolidated view of the tasks that the release management team must perform to drive the completion of the change requests and the activities required to close the release.
Plan
Plan the dates and milestones for the release. After you save the initial draft, you can link the related change requests. While planning the release request, you can also create or add activities.
Build
Before deploying the release into production, you need to make sure that all items in the release manifest and plan are built as required. During the build milestone, assemble the configuration items (CIs) needed to create the release package before the service is released.
Test
Appropriate test must be executed before the release can be deployed. During the test milestone, you make sure that any CIs, IT Services, or processes meet their specifications and requirements. When all tests are completed satisfactorily, the release coordinator seeks approval from the Change Manager before deploying the package.
Deployment
During the deployment milestone, the release is rolled out to the business. Change requests and related activities are closed during this milestone.
Close down
During the close down milestone, conduct reviews to receive feedback on the effectiveness of the release, and record metrics for deployment to make sure that the release met its service targets.
Testing your knowledge
Check your knowledge. See if you can answer each question. Click the questions to view the answer.
Do you want to learn more?
For additional details about the release management lifecycle, see Release management overview.
When you're ready to get started, see Managing releases.
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