Why Software Release Planning is Important?

To avoid costly failures and achieve your organization’s desired goals, it is important to invest in a solid release management process. There is no place for half-baked releases in this ever-changing, constantly developing digital world. It is important to mention here that 75% of problems result from modifications in the software or its environment.

Today, in this blog, we are going to discuss what software release planning is, why it is so important at every stage of development, and what are the essential steps for a successful software release.

What is a Software Release Planning?

According to the ISO/IEC 20000 standard, a release is a set of one or more new or changed services or service components deployed to production as a result of one or more modifications.

Software release means that now customers can easily access the services and functions. It is worth mentioning here that release management is a business rather than a technical responsibility. This is because release planning decisions can put major effects on revenue or portfolio management business strategy.

Why Software Release Plan is important?

The software release plan helps any organization to set and clarify goals including product goals that match the needs of both the business and target audience. Release planning is the time when the development team evaluates the required workload.

Software Release Plan helps you to complete the general list of features and makes it convenient for any company to decide when each of them should be released. One thing that is important to mention here is that your plan should take into account the time and budget aspects of the product development process.

Types of Releases

There are three types of software releases in release management

• Major
• Minor
• Emergency.

These different types of software releases help any company to manage how it can update and maintain its software better.

In major software releases, we make changes to existing features or additions of entirely new features to the software. Most of them fix problems from the previous software version. While Minor Software Releases include minor bug fixes and make improvements. In order to provide large-scale point updates, such improvements and issues are typically installed on top of major releases. On the other hand, emergency includes bug fixing. It also resolves the issues in software applications that slow down their performance.

5 Critical Stages for the Right Organization & Implementation of a Successful Software Release:

There are five stages of a successful software release that include Planning, building, testing, preparing, and deploying. Each stage is critical for a successful software release.

Planning is the first stage which includes writing a business case and building a work breakdown structure to match the project dependencies.

The second step is to start building the software where the goals should be assigned to stakeholders, and information about the project should already be clear.

The third stage is the critical one and that is testing which is essential to ensure the product works correctly and is ready to run.

The fourth stage is preparing. At this stage, your team should complete the required changes and functionality optimizations. It is important to check here that each piece of software is working properly and is ready to run.

The final step in releasing software is Deployment. It is the process of bringing the original idea of the software to life. Which means bringing functionality into the real world.

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