I spent the past few days at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas. While there, I got to show off Serena Release Manager v5, which was very well received. It was great to see how people reacted to our way of visualizing releases.
The people I talked to at the show, for the most part, had no control over release processes. I can only recall one person who didn’t believe their organization had release management challenges.
That got me thinking. If others in an organization can see obvious release management issues (often significant), why aren’t they being addressed with more urgency in many organizations we talk to? I’m guessing it’s because release management issues span multiple teams and that makes them hard to solve. It’s easier to ignore the issues until a major problem arises, such as the Knight Capital incident.
If you decide to address your release management problems head on, how do you know your initiatives have an impact?
While CAMS is associated with DevOps, it is essential to helping improve your release management processes. When demoing Serena Release Manager v5, I was easily able to demonstrate how we addressed all aspects of CAMS.