Release Management Can Be a Challenge - Automation with Rev-Trac 7 Greatly Simplifies the Task (Part IV of IV)

[Former Member]

Previously I showed how defining your release categories is essential to building specific processes to handle them. The processes you develop will go directly to your outcomes, including how well you accelerate change to the business and enhance your company’s competitive advantage.

In this final Release Management article, I’ll show how Rev-Trac 7 helps simplify the many challenges of automating Release Management. In fact, Rev-Trac 7 cuts the clicks for one common procedure from 11 down to only two, reducing error-prone manual clicks by over 80%. That’s not a typo.

Here’s how Rev-Trac 7 streamlines a release. First, you create a change request (or release) representing a large unit of work. Its one-to-many relationship with individual project changes avoids any need to manually create references between related requests. That’s something you might otherwise do hundreds of times per large release.

Your change request now has transports attached with individual changes to be approved, tested, and so forth. When the work is finished, changes are copied onto a single Rev-Trac request so they all move together into the next stage. In effect, you’ve rolled out a group of approved transports all at once, in their optimum order - automatically.

It can take a lot of manual work to link a release to all of its changes. Rev-Trac 7 further automates the process by introducing formal release request types – requests with particular attributes are all treated in a specified way. The assigned request type limits what changes can go onto the release.

Rev-Trac 7’s new Release Management Workbench uses drag-and-drop to link releases and all their changes. You select change requests like files and drop them onto a release request (like into a folder.) When you save your changes, Rev Trac 7 automatically creates reference links and syncs the transports onto the release, saving many manual steps. Automated linking works bidirectionally, so when you remove a change from the release any affected links are updated.

Releases become faster and safer as the improved Rev-Trac Release Management provides better visibility into the releases themselves. You can also lock down a release according to its status – Rev-Trac enforcement will not allow anyone to add changes to a release marked for Production. Multiple-change packages are secure with no individual lock downs needed.

If a release is out of sync or if the number of transports doesn’t equal the number expected in the release, Rev-Trac 7 notifies you via the Release Management Workbench. There’s no need for manual sync verification. The workbench also drills down to details of selected releases. If there is parallel development, you can perform Rev-Trac OOPS checks right from the workbench.