Releases are the core of IBM UrbanCode Release. Narrowly speaking, creating a release means naming the release and selecting a lifecycle and team by using the web user interface. However, you can use the tools in IBM UrbanCode Release to make the releases reflect and fit into your enterprises' process framework.
When you plan a release, you establish its scope; you can easily create both major and minor releases. A major release typically requires new environments and applications, and a minor release typically reuses existing environments and applications or subset of its applications. You also determine which larger processes, such as lifecycle or process checklists, to use or create. Finally, you establish both the release processes and deliverables and the relationships and dependencies with other releases.
You can use IBM UrbanCode Release to manage the details of your release process, from preproduction to testing and quality assurance to the final production delivery. You can use release processes to manage automated and manual processes that are either scheduled or ad hoc. Additionally, you can use the calendar and scheduling features of IBM UrbanCode Release to establish a predictable schedule that is available to all the business units in your enterprise.
When you create your release plan in IBM UrbanCode Release, you can integrate and synchronize team-based planning to arrive at a clear plan. All stakeholders know the schedule and key milestones and can be assured that the releases start on schedule and are completed on time.
Each release has a lifecycle, which specifies the progression of phases for that release. IBM UrbanCode Release provides a default lifecycle that you can modify to reflect your release process. A lifecycle can include phases like development and quality assurance, but it usually ends with a production phase. If a phase that you require is not defined in a lifecycle, you can modify the model or create a new one.
A lifecycle can be used for any number of releases and contain any number of phases. For each of these phases, you specify one or more release environments, which represent the systems on which the applications are deployed during the phase. Each phase can have one or more phase approvals, which require the approval of a certain role before the application can move to the next phase. Phases can also have quality gates, statuses that must apply to an application before it can enter a phase.
You can also add a process checklist to the release. Process checklists consist of milestones. You use milestones to track release events that are not deployment tasks. For example, you can create milestones to represent cross-team project meetings or tasks that must be completed by certain dates.
Although you can create a release that is composed entirely of milestones and infrastructure-related tasks, most releases involve deploying applications. You can create applications by using two methods: creating new applications in IBM UrbanCode Release itself and importing existing applications from IBM UrbanCode Deploy. Each release has available to it all the applications that are defined in IBM UrbanCode Release. A release can contain one or more applications, and an application can be part of any number of releases.