releasetracking

Releasetracking is a structured practice for monitoring and documenting the lifecycle of software releases from planning through deployment and post-release review. It provides visibility into progress, ownership, and risk, helping ensure alignment with business objectives and regulatory requirements.

Core elements include a release plan and calendar, version-to-branch mappings, dependency tracking, feature and bug-fix mapping to versions, and rollback or kill-switch strategies. Release notes, acceptance criteria, and testing status are associated with each release to create a centralized record of changes.

Process and governance: a release governance body or release manager oversees cadence and gates, coordinates development, QA, operations, and product stakeholders, and approves releases. Typical cadences vary by organization (weekly, biweekly, or monthly), with predefined gates for quality checks and rollback readiness.

Data and metrics: releasetracking collects and surfaces data such as release lead time, cycle time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and time to recovery. Data sources include issue trackers, CI/CD pipelines, change management tickets, and deployment logs.

Tools and implementation: it is typically supported by integrated tooling that links issue tracking, build and test results, configuration management, and deployment records to a single release dashboard or repository of release artifacts.

Benefits and challenges: benefits include increased transparency, improved coordination across development, operations, and product teams, and lower risk of outages. Challenges include data fragmentation, overhead to maintain the tracking record, and cultural resistance to new processes.

Releasetracking sits within release management and DevOps practices, complementing change management and IT service management.