Release management

Overview

An important concept in the Scrum methodology is what is called “potentially shippable product” – As explained on the Scrum Alliance site:

A potentially shippable product is one that has been designed, developed and tested and is therefore ready for distribution to anyone in the company for review or even to any external stakeholder. Adhering to a list of “done” criteria ensures that the sprint product is truly shippable.
The agile community differs in their opinion of what is shippable and what is potentially shippable. Many agile practitioners believe that potentially shippable is just one sprint away from the release. Others believe that potentially shippable means just that, ready to go to the customer immediately following the sprint. What does this mean for our definition?

While it is up to each scrum team to define what a “potentially shippable product” really means, theSCRUM proposes a way to describe software releases in a way that is more product/business/value oriented than release notes: by easily letting the product owner / scrum master map user stories to release.

The release dashboard

Property	Description
Platform	The name of the software platform that will be updated through this release (i.e: “WebSite”, “Backend”, “Public Web Services”…)
Release name	The name of release (i.e: “1.0″, “1.1″…)
Planned date	Planned release date
Deployed date	Effective release date
Comment	Briefly describe the release
	Link to the release page

The release page

The release page lists all the stories that are currently attached to a release, with the ability to un-link some stories. As the release is described with user stories – in business / product words – this view is a nice addition to a “classic” release note.

The monthly release reports

The monthly release reports provide a view of all the releases and their content delivered during a month.

Links to monthly reports are available from the home page of theSCRUM.