PART 6

Releasing

Over the years much has changed in the way we develop software. We have started to build more often than in the past, sometimes every night. Instead of a build development phase and a separate build phase, we strive to form one continuous flow. This process is referred to as a continuous delivery process as it can be implemented to help us deliver features to our customers in an efficient and deterministic way. Analyzing how we release our software gives us insight into what steps in the process have dependencies to other steps, which steps are handled manually, which steps are error-prone, and so on. This helps us to improve our process so that we can deliver higher value to stakeholders and customers.

In Part VI we look at the concept of Continuous Delivery and what it means. In this part we also look at build automation using the TFS Build system. With automated builds in place we can create new releases of our software whenever we want and in a predictable way. We also can use automated builds to drive the continuous integration and delivery process by integrating deployment and testing with the build process. Finally, we can use automated builds to support the ALM process by measuring code quality, providing metrics, and giving feedback in a consistent way.

In Chapter 27 we focus on application deployment and running automated tests on dedicated test servers. We show the overall build-deploy-test process and focus on how we can extend the default process template by adding the deployment and test on test server activities with as little effort as possible.

Software systems, development processes, and project resources have tended to be distributed more and more over the recent years. This means that they become more and more complex and specialized. Most often, software products are in an ongoing development cycle with testing and releases integrated, making it all even more complex to manage. In this part we see how we can use Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012 to improve our release management process.