Releasing software#
A release is a repeatable plan that is used to drive deployments.
Releases are the organizing focus of software deliveries. Releases can represent any software-development-related event, from major milestones in the life of the company to comparatively minor events, like recurring maintenance. You can schedule a release at any point in your development-operations lifecycle. You can automate release schedules or manually run deployments.
A release contains deployment plans and events that are related in some business-meaningful way. For example, the deployment plans might represent the phases in a software development lifecycle, such as development, QA, and production. An event might represent a blackout that affects the release.
Every value stream has a corresponding pipeline generated for it, and every pipeline has deployment plan templates. The tight relationship between pipelines and deployments makes it easy to use pipelines to drive deployments. You can start a project by creating a release and adding deployment plans and events to it. Or you can start with value streams and pipelines and then join them to a release. You can run deployments directly from a pipeline or from a deployment plan.
You can coordinate several releases into a single event, which ensures that all release stakeholders can participate. If you add events to a release, you can use the calendar to organize releases and deployment plans.
- Managing a release
Use the release details page to view details about a specific release. - Managing releases
Release management is the process of planning, scheduling, and controlling software deliveries. -
Archiving releases
You can archive a release to remove it from the list of releases. - Events and tags
An event represents a release-related activity that you manage with the calendar. A tag is a label that you can add to a release or an event. You can use tags to filter the Activities list on the Releases page. Tags do not appear on the calendar. - Restoring archived releases, plans, and templates
You can restore archived releases, deployment plans, and templates. - Deployment plans
A deployment plan is a container for tasks. Tasks define the activities that your team runs to complete a software deployment. - Running deployments
Complete deployments by resolving the tasks in a deployment plan. - Tasks
A task represents a business-meaningful activity that is associated with a software deployment. Each task is defined on a separate row in a deployment plan. During a deployment, you run tasks defined in the deployment plan to complete the deployment. - Using properties
A deployment plan can contain user-defined properties. Properties values can be defined at design- or run-time.