How would you rate your company’s release management process?  Are you in need of ideas to improve release flow and drive efficiency?  Do you want more release visibility and speed?  If you’re nodding your head, then keep reading.  Serena recently hosted a webinar entitled Five Ways to Streamline Release Management.  We featured independent research firm Forrester Research, Inc. principal analyst Jeffrey S. Hammond, who is a leading expert on improving software development productivity.

In the webinar Jeffrey talked about how top development organizations address release management, key industry trends, and opportunities for optimizing development organizations to support the release management process.  Plus, the results of Forrester’s market research and release management survey were revealed.

We learned that:

• The velocity and volume of releases are increasing rapidly.  Manual and fragmented processes will not scale. 
• Agile adoption among development teams is highlighting the lack of release automation and an increasingly visible bottleneck is forming that does not satisfy the needs of the business, development or operations.
• Organizations need to revisit release management in relation to other ALM practices, such as build and software configuration management, testing and quality assurance, project management and deployment.

To tie release management together with these ALM practices and streamline the workflow, while leveraging your existing infrastructure, Forrester recommended five “next practices” for improving release visibility and speed:

1. Improve prebuild process.
2. Expand release management throughput.
3. Optimize release pipelines.
4. Design software for rapid change.
5. Create common release portals.

Read more on Forrester’s findings in Jeffrey Hammond’s report, Five Ways to Streamline Release Management.