Product overview

BMC Release Process Management (BRPM) helps you manage software release planning, release coordination, and application deployment automation. Software systems, the software development process, and resources have become more distributed, highly specialized, and more complex. Software undergoes complicated processes during development, testing, and release. The development and testing platforms have grown more complicated. All of these issues and complexities mean that the whole release process must be monitored closely and the various pieces must be integrated in a controlled manner.

This topic consists of the following sections:

• Benefits of release management software
• BRPM functional overview
• Application metadata 

Benefits of release management software

In a typical organization that does not use release management software, dedicated resources are required to oversee the software release process, including resources to manage the integration and flow of development, testing, deployment, and the support of the various systems and resources required in the release process. Project managers use various manual tools (for example, spreadsheets) and techniques to monitor and control the steps and stages of software projects and software product development. Data is carefully entered and saved regularly. Software architects and project managers can be so concerned about design aspects that they overlook the necessary day-to-day tracking of the project, which can be critical for some stages.

Release management software helps control and manage the various aspects of the release process, including operating systems, tools, software application platforms, resource allocation, various business functions in software development, and deployment. Release management software also helps you to meet the challenges of:

• Software defects
• Issues
• Risks
• Software change requests
• New development requests, including requests for extra features and other requests from end users
• Deployment and packaging
• New development tasks

BRPM functional overview

BRPM addresses the challenges of the software release process and provides you high-level and automated control over the release process. BRPM supports the following functions:

• Release planning and release management—Provides release calendars, lifecycle planning, activity scheduling, and resource allocations
• Controls—Provides real-time status updates, notifications, and managed teamwork during the release process
• Collaboration—Provides groupware-style functions, roles, and functional assignments
• Self-service automation—Provides complex provisioning sequences
• Agile software development—Provides for the frequent movement of application software out of development and into operations

These functions enable an organization to:

• Deploy business-critical application changes faster, at lower cost, and with fewer errors
• Obtain a single source of truth for all releases (past, current, and planned) with a centralized, graphical, web-based interface
• Elevate invisible release processes into visible, measurable process flows
• Pinpoint bottlenecks, enabling process optimization and increased automation
• Support collaboration between development and operations
• Model processes, applications, and environments with reusable templates
• Ensure consistency and flexibility in release planning and execution
• Leverage logging, alerts, and reports to ensure release process compliance and provide transparency across organizations

Application metadata

Metadata provides information about one or more aspects of data, including the following:

• Means of creation of the data
• Purpose of the data
• Time and date of creation
• Creator or author of data
• Location on a computer network where the data was created
• Standards used

Metadata enables you to manage settings for miscellaneous objects that are used within BRPM. For example, you can manage procedures, templates for requests, business processes, and releases while you design a request. You can manage tasks, phases, and categories that you use to operate on steps and categorize them. Lists enable you to manage enumerations.

To display a list of metadata used in BRPM, click the Environment tab and select Metadata. From the Metadata tab, you can manage metadata lists and settings for the application.

Instructions for adding metadata to advanced tasks are provided with those tasks. See Setting-up-miscellaneous-metadata to learn about basic uses of metadata.