Today i was in an event organized by IBM, about “Change and release management for software development“. I’m not a “devel” guy, but anything in computer science is about software, and one way or another you will must handle change and release management. Actually, change management, and release management have a big role in ITIL, and the beautiful part of this event was that the focus was on the concept, and the important practices to understand and handle the whole process. Ok, Ok, they did show the softwares they have to handle the process too (ClearQuest, ClearCase)…

They talk about build and deployment motivators (compliance, repeatability and reliability, security, and lifecycle automation). The roles in managing builds and deployments (developer, build engineer, deployer, and tester), the phases (system test, integration test, pre-production test, production), and about the biggest software delivery challenges.

I think is important to know that automating manual tasks, managing the assembly phase, automating the software delivery lifecycle as a whole, will produce a robust change and release management process, and you will be able to produce more and better software. Look, when i say “produce” i’m not assuming you are a developer or a devel company, but that you can change your enviroment, enhance your environment with new software. Everybody has a environment with postfix, java, apache, tomcat, and a lot of other softwares, that make this same environment complex and hard to deploy, but that is not excuse to not evolve (neither to evolve without procedures). So, i think this concepts and procedures are really useful for everyone…

Last, they talk about the jazz framework and the alfaworks.ibm.com project.
That’s all