Continuous Delivery

Release Management White Paper and Assessment

I work at ThoughtWorks Studios, where I am product manager for Go (our continuous integration and release management platform, of which more in a future post), and a general big mouth about build and release management. As part of the launch of the book and of Go 2.0, we've created some collateral you might find useful - a white paper on release management and a build and release management assessment.

The white paper, "Agile Release Management: Towards Frequent, Low-Risk Releases" (warning: registration required, but it's free) is actually a pretty good summary of many of the things Dave and I discuss in the book, so worth checking out if you want to have a brief overview of our approach to the problem of getting software live in medium and large organizations. It's also a useful summary if you're trying to introduce continuous delivery to management.

We've also created a multiple-choice assessment that grades your team's maturity at build and release management according to the model we present in Chapter 15 of the book. The final report you get when you complete it includes a table which lays out the maturity model. There's also a more general agile assessment at the same site.

While a multiple-choice assessment obviously can't replace a serious investigation of your organization's capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses, it is a useful starting point in such an investigation. I was happy to hear Dave Thomas talk about the importance of assessments in his Agile 2010 keynote - doing an assessment is step one in his list of how to do an agile transformation programme (and the rest of the list has a lot in common with the material we set out in our book).

Although they're created by ThoughtWorks Studios, both the white paper and the assessment are vendor neutral. There is of course advertising for the book and the ThoughtWorks Studios ALM suite at the end, because hey, we're proud of our stuff.

If you have any feedback or want any further information, please feel free to leave a comment.