Plutora - Turning Release Managers into the New Heroes of Software Development

Held back by complex release processes and reacting to information changes and requests, the result can be a failure by a ‘thousand shoulder taps.’ In these circumstances, release management simply cannot deliver a progressive or proactive impact.

Given that many of the traditional release management duties are being automated, release managers increasingly feel that their role is in question in a DevOps environment. To stay relevant and facilitate the evolution of software development, release managers know they need to be doing more, but they also need the tools and data to accomplish that. 

That’s why today Plutora is announcing a set of key features that enable a new style of release management—Progressive Release Management. These new features include: 

• A revamped release insights dashboard that guides teams to problem areas and hot spots, enabling release managers to manage by exception and free up their time and energy to improve process and efficiency

• New build analytics to provide stability, quality and risk information for every pipeline  

• Initiative tracking analytics that match initiatives to progress, utilizing flow metrics to predict delivery progress and enabling release managers to redirect resources to align with business priorities.

This adds up to a solution that allows teams to double the amount of features delivered to customers, unstick and advance DevOps capabilities and reduce the incidents caused by changes by one-third. Ultimately, Progressive Release Management is transforming release managers from their role as gatekeepers to that of DevOps enablers.

“Release management has never been a simple job, and DevOps and CI/CD have complicated the role,” said Jason Bloomberg, President, Intellyx. “Plutora’s new features will help to transform the duties of overburdened release managers. Progressive release managers will be able to move faster, deliver higher quality, and achieve greater business value, thus furthering their organizations’ DevOps journeys.”

The Power of Insights

One way Plutora is empowering release managers to become DevOps enablers is with the new Insights Dashboard. By surfacing value stream insights that span the enterprise portfolio, release managers can pinpoint where to focus their time and resources. When release managers identify issues before they become full-blown problems, it becomes easier to remove delays, improve quality and reduce production incidences. 

Plutora’s revamped release Insights Dashboard brings together disparate data from a wide range of sources from idea to delivery, including software quality across the value stream that previously could only be aggregated manually. Unifying these insights provides a complete view of scope and development progress, activity, status and compliance of releases across the portfolio, enabling release managers to automatically identify releases at risk and improve the flow of work in every value stream. 

https://youtu.be/L7ikpM3qo_w

Unstick the DevOps Journey

If organizations are to improve software delivery efficiency and quality, they need to create a pathway for continuous improvement. Without it, they are likely to remain stuck in the middle of their DevOps journey—a problem seen across many teams, according to the State of DevOps Report 2021.

The challenge is a lack of real visibility and management into the process. Instead, Plutora enables progressive releases managers to employ value stream flow metrics and DevOps metrics for continuous improvement to tie insights into long-term cycle time reduction and throughput increases to accelerate their DevOps evolution.

Reduce the Risk of Bringing New Features to Customers with Build Analytics

Adding to the challenges faced by release managers is that quality, stability, and risk information is buried and embedded in software build results scattered across the organization. This can seriously impact the application delivery pipeline with the result that even one team can break the entire release train, and it can be helpful to know if the build has a long and frequent successful history or a large commit with an infrequent and sporadically successful history. 

However with Progressive Release Management powered by Plutora, build analytics are available from every pipeline, allowing organizations to better understand the history of the software to gauge quality, stability, and risk of releases.

Deliver on Business Objectives

All too often, software initiatives are proposed but have no tracking on their success, results or even progress. Since initiatives span teams and long periods of time, it can be nearly impossible for development teams to answer a fundamental question: “how are we delivering on our initiatives and business objectives?”

In contrast, progressive release managers using Plutora can drill down into the progress of business initiatives via value stream flow metrics to predict progress and manage scheduling against key milestones and overall priorities.

In these organizations, a progressive release manager is empowered to adopt value stream thinking and focus on accelerating the flow of work from idea to production. Using these advanced tools, work becomes significantly more visible, and tasks are automated, allowing them to manage by exception.

To learn more, click here.