CI and Release Management Survey

Last week we offered a survey on Continuous Integration and Release Management practices to webcast attendees and readers of CMCrossroads. The results confirmed some of our suspicions about the state of software development. Most teams are using some automation, and have tools in place to ensure repeatable builds. But while a leading edge of teams are pushing that automation and traceability further towards release most are not.

It's particularly striking how little teams know about the builds the release into production. Roughly a quarter of respondents can not identify the source code that matches the build in production. Only 60% can determine who promoted a release to production and less than half can show how well their production releases performed in testing.

As an industry, we're getting pretty good at build, but are still struggling with release management.

Follow the link to complete survey results and analysis. Results are still coming in and we plan to update our summary page as appropriate.


Re: CI and Release Management Survey

I think part of the problem with Release Management is that there are a wide variety of definitions of the term. Some use it to denote only the creation of a Production build, while at the other extreme some use it to mean deployment to "User" environments. The reality is somewhere in the middle. I know there is an upcoming issue of the CM Journal (September, I think) on build and deployment management and one on Release Management back in May, 2008. You also address part of this in your blog entry on promotion of code vs. builds, but without consensus, the automation we all want will be slower to arrive than we like.

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