InCycle Team Release™ extends Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2005/2008 functionality to aid the team in more effectively managing the process surrounding the promotion and deployment of software builds between environments by providing traceability, a formalized workflow, automated deployment script support, and a seamless connection between the different groups involves in the development lifecycle. Incycle Team Release introduces the Promotion work item that leverages the power of VSTS such as the relationships between the source code changes and work items, as well as their link to the produced builds. InCycle Release Manager facilitates the deployment of changes from one environment to another by providing:

  Easy access to what changes are about to be deployed or has been deployed since the last deployment in a specific environment

  Automated release notes generation

  Easy drill-down to each of the related builds, work items and source code changes related to a promotion

  Automated deployment of a build to an environment through the definition of PowerShell scripts

  Approval workflow support for promotions Centralized documentation related to promotion events

HERE ARE THE BENEFITS:

Efficient Testing

When a build is being promoted from the Development to the QA environment, software testing engineers often spend time listing all of the changes to the application since the last time it was tested. The Promotion work item automatically links to the change sets associated with the build, allowing QA engineers to ensure test coverage remains complete and up to date as requirements change and bugs get fixed.

Image 1: Promotion to the Test Environment

What code did we change to break this?

Debugging is a time consuming and tedious phase of the software development cycle. However, with Team Release going back to a specific version of code is no longer a challenge. The Promotion work item centralizes all initial code files to release in production files allowing developers to quickly trace back the work items containing the source of software error.

Image 2: Full Traceability of Code Change

Clear Audit Trail

Team Release provides an efficient way to manage the efforts of all team members with full traceability back to initial project goals. Promotion work item’s link to related work items (tasks, bugs, etc.), allows team’s progress-to-goals to remain visible at all times, even as work is handed off among team members. Information, such as who made what changes, when and why; who deployed a specific build in a specific environment; what pieces make up a particular release and the state of the life cycle of a particular file, is quickly accessible.

Reduce Error - Workflow

Team Release reduces the cost of deploying builds in different environments by allowing the release management team to automate the deployment using scripts and/or by attaching documents containing task definitions and clear deployment instructions to the Promotion work item. With this guidance, team members are ensured that all pieces are deployed in the correct order without compromising the integrity or availability of the target environment.

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