Release Orchestration

Intent: Ensure that Delivery Teams contributing to the release of a product or service are aligned to do so, and that no opportunity to address market demand is lost.

Proverbs:

• No one can whistle a symphony, it takes an orchestra to play it

Also Known As:

• Release Management

• Release Planning. Note that the emphasis in agile Release Orchestration is to minimize release planning, and associated batch sizes, as far as possible.

Motivation: Delivery Teams should collaborate between themselves and release more often to better support demand (consumer pull). Releases may then occur as often as teams and their Product Owners are able to arrange.

Structure: An organization determines that it will release value at a certain cadence, with a view towards eventually supporting Release on Demand. This cadence, or transformation heartbeat, is a regular inspect-and-adapt opportunity for gauging the success of enterprise agile adoption and the lean delivery of value. Delivery Teams will collaborate (by means of a “Scrum of Scrums” or similar body) to ensure that releases do in fact occur on each heartbeat. Product Owners will exert pull for release on a more frequent and self-organized basis.

Applicability: Release Management is applicable to all agile methods, although very lean ones may automate much of this through continuous integration and deployment (Release on Demand).

Consequences: Value is delivered more frequently and work done has less opportunity to depreciate.

Implementation: Holding a “Scrum of Scrums” between Delivery Teams is one way to orchestrate releases. DevOps and Lean Kanban teams may use a Release on Demand model. During agile transformation, releases should be aligned at least once per organizational inspect and-adapt-cycle (transformation heartbeat).See Also:

• Agile Transformation

• Enterprise Release Management Orchestration, by Naeem Hussain

• Release Planning in Scrum, Agile Alliance

• Release Planning, extremeprogramming.org