Top 3 Trends in Software Development

The reality of modern software development and delivery mean a few things.

1. Software projects are increasingly agile

The term “Agile” is often overused, what does it mean in the context of release management? While “Agile” is a development process, it can also translate to software projects that are delivered more frequently with less ceremony surrounding a given release. This trend can be developed to a point where a large software system is pushed to production multiple times a day, and these are systems that are commonplace in these organizations such as Google and Facebook. The companies push mission-critical systems to production every day in a way that would make the use of heavy ITIL-based release management tools impractical.

2. Deployments are increasingly self-service

This means that developers and development groups have direct access to deploy code to production. This is a dramatic shift made possible by the ease with which developers can now provision virtual machines in cloud environments. If your organization uses an internal cloud on OpenStack your developers may also have direct access to tools that allow for self-service configuration management and software deployment. In these organizations, release managers are an important bridge between self-service deployments and supportable service delivery.

3. Releases are increasingly distributed

Take a large e-commerce or social networking website as an example and you’ll quickly see that a software release requires the coordination of several independent systems.

As more and more enterprises move to a server-oriented architecture software releases have become less amenable to modeling as a single release event.

Modern Software Releases Demand Flexibility

Large enterprises with several development groups, agile development practices, and frequent releases are finding themselves in a continuous state of releasing software. It is this always-on nature of software releases that are most incompatible with ITSM models. To read the ITIL standard is to understand the model of software delivery from nearly two decades ago: when software releases were rare events to be managed with process and ceremony.Modern software developers are dynamic and distributed and large organizations are effectively managing the risks of software releases without adopting strict ITSM guidelines across the entire effort. If an enterprise is looking to adopt a mixed array of IT standards it needs to adopt a tool that can be tailored to fit the individual idiosyncrasies that develop in any large organization.Whether you have multiple development teams using slightly different strains of Agile development or teams that have adopted procedures more aligned with ITSM, your release management function and the tools you adopt to support it need to be able to adapt and evolve with your organization.Do you want to know if Release Management will fit your organization? Read our free white paper: “Release Management is Not a “One Size Fits All” Solution”. Get it now!