What is Build and Release Management

Build and release management is the process of managing, planning, scheduling, and controlling a software build throughout its lifecycle.

Building an application or software involves various stages. Each build has different build numbers and it is always built from a source code repository like git. Building an application or software requires build tools like ant, maven, gradle, etc. Build tools compile the source code files into reusable executable files or packages.

Build and Release management will control the life cycle of a software product, the process of planning, managing, scheduling, and controlling the build in different stages and environments like development, testing, staging, and production stages.

There are 5 types of environments in build and release infrastructure :

• DEV –
  Development team maintains this environment to write their code. Only the development team has access to this environment. QA or other teams don’t have access to this environment. Dev team uses this environment, mostly to write unit test cases.
• QA –
  QA environment is owned by the testing team and the actual testing takes place in this environment. The DEV team does not have access to the QA environment. After coding completion, the code is moved from DEV to QA environment for test execution.
• UAT –
  User Acceptance Test environment is used by business users to conduct testing after system testing has been completed. In this phase, the product is tested from the business point of view. UAT environment access is restricted only to the business users and on some occasions, temporary access will be provided to the QA team if in case of business users need assistance.
• STAGING –
  The STAGING environment exactly resembles the production environment. The application installed in the staging environment should match closely with the production environment.
• PROD –
  The PROD environment is the production environment that is accessed by real users and none of the DEV and QA teams have access to this environment.