Goal
The goal of Release Management is to plan and oversee the implementation of approved Changes into production.
Scope
Release Management applies exclusively to all EGI branded services in the service catalogue of EGI Foundation.
Release Management operates as a peer process in conjunction with Change Management and as such augments and supports the existing change management policy and processes. It covers all Changes that are approved by Change Management.
Policy
All changes to IT resources, services and / or systems approved by Change Management are required to follow this Release policy.
All releases will follow the change process as defined by the CHM1 Manage changes including emergency changes procedure.
Each regular release requires the following:
Release Plan: It includes date of release, release notes, recommended duration of testing period, expected deployment in production date, access to documentation for users and administrators (if applicable), location of the packages (if applicable), the deployment procedure (if applicable).
Contingency Plan: It includes the means to deal with disruptions caused by an unsuccessful change of high impact or high risk. This can be avoided in the case of an emergency release.
Testing: All regular releases must be tested in a controlled acceptance test environment prior to implementing. If a controlled test environment is not available, best effort is acceptable until such controlled test environment becomes available.
Release frequency: The maximum releases frequency is once per month (per service). Emergency releases are not computed in the frequency.
For lightweight releases: A simplified release plan will apply to changes classified with low risk and low impact by CHM.
For emergency releases: The emergency change process as defined by the CHM1 Manage changes including emergency changes procedure will be followed for all emergency changes.