The Role of the Release Manager in DevOps

Release management is the practice of planning, scheduling, and managing the software release process from development and testing through to production. With the adoption of Agile methodologies, businesses have moved to more frequent releases of smaller, iterative improvements to their products and features. The role of the release manager emerged to ensure successful deliveries without causing issues in production. Release managers are responsible for planning the release calendar, coordinating across functions at each stage of the release cycle, ensuring all approvals are in place, and delivering successful releases. As DevOps has become prevalent, some aspects of the release management process have changed, along with a shift in release managers' responsibilities. Continuous delivery practices enable more frequent software releases, reducing human error and risks associated with continuous delivery through progressive delivery and feature flags. Release managers can now focus on monitoring metrics, reporting on them, and guiding future iterations based on customer feedback, potentially evolving into value stream managers.