Where in your org structure is Release Management?

Found an interesting article that talks about this question. It's worth a read ...

Release Management - QA or engineering?

There seems to be some debate around where in an organization Release Management really belongs. Is release management a function of engineering, or is it a function of quality assurance or quality control? A case can be made for both, or neither.

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In the place where I currently work, the release management team is a subset of the QA team. But in my previous organization, the organization is big and the product is complex enough that we had a separate release management team reporting to a separate VP that took care of release management of a set of products.

In any case, the release management team needs to be treated as a separate stake holder so as to ensure effective implementation of processes.

Release Management in Wikipedia

Found the following useful articles in Wikipedia that explains Release management,

• Release Management
• Release Management Method

An excerpt from Release management:

A Release Manager is:
- Facilitator – serves as a liaison between varying business units to guarantee smooth and timely delivery of software products or updates.
- Gatekeeper – “holds the keys” to production systems/applications and takes responsibility for their implementations.
- Architect – helps to identify, create and/or implement processes or products to efficiently manage the release of code.
- Server Application Support Engineer – help troubleshoot problems with an application (although not typically at a code level).
- Coordinator – utilized to coordinate disparate source trees, projects, teams and components.

Video on Release Management

Found this video on YouTube about Release Management in large free software projects. The speaker discusses his research work in this area. He focuses on time based release management.

This is a long video (60 mins), so have some time before setting off to watch the video.