How Does AnthillPro Help Me Manage the Release Process?

Release Process

The process of taking the results of a build and providing them to others to use. Sometimes the release process also encompasses the actual deployment.

This is a very simplified view of things because the road from Build to Release may be quite long and complicated. The build binaries (artifacts) may pass though QA for testing. They may go through any number of automated tests before even getting to QA. After QA, the binaries may go through User Acceptance tests or a staging area. Then, the binaries may finally go into production.

But what does going into production mean? For some type of applications, it may simply mean being deployed on the production hardware. For other projects, going into production may mean that the CD image is released to a vendor for duplication. And for yet different projects going into production may mean moving the binary to a download server.

There are perhaps other steps that we left out of the release process. One may be that a unique version number is assigned to the release. Typically this takes the form of <major>.<minor>.<patch> but other version numbering schemes are also possible. Another related step may be to label the source code repository with the version number.

It is critically important to know exactly what went into the release. This means knowing the exact revision of each source file that was used to produce the binaries. For maintenance releases, this would mean knowing what issues were fixed in the current release and what files were modified for each issue and by whom.