Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2013

Chapter 6Release Management

What's in this chapter?

• Developing good practices around release management, including binary releases
• Understanding why and when to use continuous delivery and what value you get from releasing more frequently
• Using and creating release paths, environments, and servers along with release templates and components to successfully deploy your software

In Chapter 5 you looked at how Visual Studio 2013 supports continuous integration as part of its application lifecycle management. You learned how the build process produces the binaries that are stored either on a network share or inside the server. In this chapter, you learn how to create a binary promotion model to transition those versioned binaries through your environments. After reading this chapter, you will have a better understanding of how to use the release management tools in combination with automated build. This will enable you to get your software from development to production so that you can get quick, actionable, and timely feedback from testers, users, and the business.

What Is Release Management?

A release is the process by which you create a working instance of your development efforts to date and subject it to a series of checks before releasing it for consumption by your customers.

While some organizations are still trying, and as often failing, to implement a code promotion release model, many companies have switched to a binary promotion model. In a code promotion model, you ...