The influence of dynamic technologies on the software release management and SaaS roadmap: a survey

A poorly understood and underdeveloped part of the software process is software release management, which is the process through which software is made available to and obtained by its users. Complicating software release management is the increasing tendency for software to be constructed as a “system of systems”, assembled from preexisting, independently produced, and independently released systems. Both developers and users of such software are affected by these complications. Developers need to accurately document complex and changing dependencies among the systems constituting the software. Users will be heavily involved in the location, retrieval, and assembly process of the systems in order to appropriately configure the software to their particular environment. In this paper we identify the issues encountered in software release management, and present an initial set of requirements for a software release management tool. We then describe a prototype of such a tool that supports both developers and users in the software release management process.

Software release management is the process through which software is made available to and obtained by its users. Until now, this process has been relatively straightforward. However, the emergence of component‐based software is complicating software release management. Increasingly, software is constructed via the assembly of pre‐existing, independently produced, and independently released components. Both developers and users of such software are affected by these complications. Developers need to accurately document the complex and changing dependencies among the components constituting the software. Users must be involved in locating, retrieving, and assembling components in order to appropriately bring the software into their particular environment. In this paper, we introduce the problem of release management for component‐based software and discuss SRM, a prototype software release management tool we have developed that supports both developers and users in the software release management process. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Software release management is the process of determining, acquiring, releasing and deploying changes into an information technology (IT) environment. The process has often been manual to a certain extent. However, the process can become quite complicated and unmanageable for communications networks, where the managed service providers may need to serve and upgrade multiple customers, environments, networks, devices and components - in parallel. An important design goal of such a process is to have a distributed, integrated and self-managed system that can continuously monitor the networks and devices, detect and determine the exceptions, locate and retrieve the upgrades from their respective sources, release and deploy the upgrades in the affected environment; all in a timely and a non-disruptive manner. This paper introduces the problem of software release management for communications networks, proposes an agent model and a novel protocol for autonomic software release management, and discusses a prototype autonomic software release management system that can be effectively used by the service providers to upgrade and maintain their customers' networks.

A software release is a fully constructed version of a software product; it often consists of a hierarchy of files arranged in a directory structure. This hierarchy may contain many different types of files. Because of the World Wide Web, there is an increasing tendency for software to consist of a system of systems (i.e., to be assembled from pre-existing, independently produced, or independently released systems). It is not easy to manage software releases of such systems with simple file utilities, because, in these systems, tasks such as determining which files are in a release, which file permissions have changed from one release to another, and which files have changed in all the releases are very difficult. This paper discusses the problems of software release management (SRM) and outlines a prototype tool — the software release inventory manager (SRIM) — that addresses these problems. The SRIM automatically identifies the various files required for a software release, builds a system to track files and releases, validates information, and produces repeatable and controlled releases.

Growing competition in the software industry with the persistently changing needs and the usual problems associated with software release, which have made acceptance of a new software in market, are extremely important for the success. Volatility in the software developmental processes is generally difficult to handle. The change request at any arbitrary point of time leads to the inevitable change and rework request. The software release process which broadly includes all the process that starts after the completion of development till the final deployment. This complete phase is exposed to various risks which may hamper the final result. This paper presents threat associated with software release activities and their possible mitigation and exploring the role played by the change management in controlling or reducing those risks.For the effective survival in ever changing software industry needs, Software Release Management takes a holistic view of the change and configuration relationship and work on the improvement strategies for the effective release with zero defect potential.

Today, with the nature of software assembled from legacy, existing independently produced and autonomous tested systems, it imposes great complexity in constructing a software release, this is especially true when a same software version is to deploy to an array of software releases targeting different environments. Reduction of defects during various phases of testing due to the deployment of wrong version of software into different environments, in a large solution projects is a huge challenge. The volume, rapid and intensive deployment required in large solution projects calls for accuracy, reliability and availability in its Software Release Management process that encompasses the planning, design, build, configuration, testing, and deployment of associated software components. In this paper we will be sharing the software release best practices applied in our National R&D Centre in ICT, discussing on the defined processes for its software release management.

In space operations environments, both software development management and system configuration management are essential to a zero-defect ground system. The two disciplines interface at release and deployment management, where source code is built into a software package, which is then deployed onto hardware underlying (ground) system configuration management. Software development workflows are typically well-specified and supported by a number of commercial and open-source solutions, e.g., version control and change management via Git and Jira, or continuous integration via Jenkins. System configuration management, governing which software package should be, and actually is installed on which hardware, can also refer to very good tool support, e.g., Puppet or Chef for configuration deployment management, or the HP uCMDB as configuration management database. These tools control, verify and document the ground system software deployment and configuration, ensuring that the system performs as intended over its projected life cycle. The missing link, both in process specification and in tool support, lies between the software development management system and the ground system configuration management system. Until now, the delivery of released software packages to the actual deployment targets consists of several manual error-prone steps, it has to overcome technical barriers (for example network barriers between staging areas and secure operational environments), and is often not transparent for system engineers. To overcome these barriers and close the missing link with appropriate tool support is the challenge we address in this paper. One approach to the problem is the principle of Continuous Delivery, a set of practices designed to ensure that software releases are delivered quickly and safely to a production environment and into the hands of users for deployment, first on test and later on operational chains. Continuous Delivery has to be distinguished here from Continuous Deployment, in which a release that has passed automated testing is also deployed automatically, which is clearly not desired when operational or customer constraints require the deployment to be triggered manually and precisely timed. Many commercial and open-source solutions accomplish part of the job. Tools such as Jenkins support deployment pipelines, Sonatype Nexus offers a repository for software libraries and build artifacts and JFrog Artifactory is a commercial binary repository. Deployment processes, however, are highly business-specific and the available solutions either suffer from being too general and heavy-weight, or from not being compatible with existing workflows and environments. The solution presented in this paper builds on the existing infrastructure and open-source tool chain, supplemented by an in-house software development. It enables us to reliably access the correct software release builds and deploy them easily on the appropriate targets, thereby also serving as a backup and history repository for the deployment packages. We have described in a previous paper how the process of manual configuration management can be automated to be made less error-prone and more complete by scanning hardware for software and transferring this information to a CM database. This automated approach relies on proper deployment management of the installed software packages, as a scan of the hardware will only return software that has been installed as a package, such as RPM (RPM Package Manager) or MSI (MicroSoft Installer). The automatic building of such packages therefore enables and improves configuration deployment and verification. The tool-enabled workflow makes both configuration management and software development management more efficient and transparent. By closing the gap between continuous integration and deployment in an operational environment, we make both configuration management and software release management more efficient and transparent.

This Development of software release is the systematic process, planning, designing, and monitoring software through different phases and settings; testing and delivery of software releases included. Traditional models, such as incremental/ iterative and ad-hoc approaches, do not fulfill today's demanding customers or I.T. companies. New methods, such as agile software creation and the continuous implementation of DevOps, occur. The research problem for this study is to understand how development and operations automation leads to improving the strategies in release management and easing operations for the I.T. sector (Slack et al., 2018). DevOps and Agile are equally beneficial to faster implementation of working functions in development. Continuous Delivery and DevOps primarily seek to provide quicker and more frequent, more stable applications to meet consumer and company needs (Verona et al., 2016). This paper provides an overview of the development of software release management, from conventional methods to agile and product development via DevOps. This study demonstrates how automation in software release management advances the strategies in the I.T. sector and ease the operations both in time and in effect to meet information system’s needs. A review of the literature will be conducted to build a robust evidence-based study on the research problem. Based on what many scholars have found out in their various studies, there is a strong correlation between improved automation and the ease of operations in release management to meet the I.T. needs. This DevOps study aims to explore the benefits of automation advancement for I.T. stakeholders and operating teams to make it easier for emerging technologies to move from initiation to completion of its operations. On a small scale, the advancement of automation is improved by alternating between infrastructure and design. More organized methods, such as CD, are generally needed in large organizations. The most advanced breakthroughs to enhance the reliability of software development in large companies are usually the application of these concepts on a scale, and it should be the focus of any significant transformation (Kim et al., 2016). The software development life cycle and its release management are seen as a painstaking process, because the available resources and time in one software release may not generally meet all requirements. However, the method enables I.T., stakeholders, based on each release restriction, to reach sections of their operational needs for product releases. There are several obstacles to the planning and review process, making it one of the most common problems in software demand engineering.

Keystone players, the company that occupies the crucial hubs, need to nurture its inhabitants to keep the ecosystem active. Many modern ecosystems have communities of practice where knowledge is transferred by collaborative problem solving, sharing of ideas, software components or configurations. In recent years a widely spread medium for communities of practice is the use of online discussion boards. This research proposes a method to analyze the relationship between software releases and activity in a community. This paper explains how software ecosystem Keystone companies can use software product release management to cultivate communities of practice using an illustrative case study. In this case study a comparison is made between two communities in the Android ecosystem. The results show peaks in community activity coinciding with the software releases. The release not only revitalizes the activity of the developers but the heterogeneous community in its entirety.

The influence of dynamic technologies on the software release management and SaaS roadmap: a survey

Software configuration management is concerned with identifying the configuration items of a system; controlling changes to them; and maintaining integrity and traceability. The configuration items are generally documents in the early part of the development lifecycle, whereas the focus is on source code control management and software release management in the later parts of the development cycle.Configuration management allows the orderly development of software, and it ensures that the impacts of proposed changes are considered prior to authorization. It ensures that releases are planned and that only authorized changes to the software are made. The integrity of the system is maintained and the constituents of the software system and their version numbers are known at all times.KeywordsConfiguration ItemsSoftware Configuration ManagementSystem Version NumberRelease BuildChange RequestsThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Supply Chain - Impact of Importance and Technology in Software Release Management

Software release management policy and technique can be significantly improved by providing configuration management personnel with the capability to independently verify that compiled modules are unchanged from the previous release. Typically, both compiling and linking processes embed various timestamps within binary compiled files, rendering conventional comparison tools useless for configuration management work. Being unable to perform such file matches wastes development effort by needlessly re-testing modules that have not changed at the object level, and risks not testing modules that have changed in some subtle way. The methodology of US Patent No 6236993 provides objective evidence that files containing embedded timestamps are identical without specifying the location, format or length of any specific timestamp within the file. The patented comparison method automatically recognizes and reconciles embedded tokens (e.g., timestamps) within binary compiled files.

As organisations transition from concept and design to the deployment and operational phases of a Production Optimisation solution, they anticipate new levels of performance and possibilities. They plan for increased production from the ‘right’ wells, with production engineers and operators able to easily access information, share near-real-time views of the same issues, and make informed production decisions on a daily basis. The organisation may have accurately estimated the cost of the project design, build, deployment and implementation. But they may have assumed ongoing maintenance costs will primarily be the IT support needed for defect fixing and software release management. That narrow definition of support can lead to problems and ultimately, decreased confidence in the solution and jeopardise its sustainability and evolution. With a new solution, new roles must be defined to reinforce the relationship between day-to-day activities and their impact on performance metrics and business targets. Continuous improvement and solution enhancements should be sponsored by appropriate decision-makers, and management must recognise and champion the contributions of these new roles. Data quality issues may require diagnosis and follow-up, with different skill-sets mobilised to address them. Engineers must own the integrity of certain information - alarm levels, valid ranges, thresholds, and calculations. End users and support team must adopt a diagnostic process for identifying the type of follow-up needed to address issues. Simple and focused support metrics need to be devised and reviewed to insure that the support model returns the anticipated benefits.

Realizing a data-driven application or workflow, that consumes bulk data files from the Web, poses a multitude of challenges ranging from sustainable dependency management supporting automatic updates, to dealing with compression, serialization format, and data model variety. In this work, we present an approach using the novel Databus Client, which is backed by the DBpedia Databus - a data asset release management platform inspired by paradigms and techniques successfully applied in software release management. The approach shifts effort from the publisher to the client while making data consumption and dependency management easier and more unified as a whole. The client leverages 4 layers (download, compression, format, and mapping) that tackle individual challenges and offers a fully automated way for extracting and compiling data assets from the DBpedia Databus, given one command and a flexible dependency configuration using SPARQL or Databus Collections. The current vertical-sliced implementation supports format conversion within as well as mapping between RDF triples, RDF quads, and CSV/TSV files. We developed an evaluation strategy for the format conversion and mapping functionality using so-called round trip tests.KeywordsData dependency managementData compilationData release management platformMetadata repositoryETL