There are many tools to help software engineers. There are source control systems to record code changes. There are bug tracking systems to keep track of software errors and communicate easily with QAs. But all those tools are useless against simple human error during release or deployment. We at Coehl are dedicated to solve those problems and give engineers automated tools to simplify release process.

Look at the past ten years, the most expensive and the most famous outages in the software business was due to some human errors: some engineer put a wrong file to a wrong place and forgot to double check. Lots of resources have been spent on improving software development process. Many companies share the same best practices. But when it comes to release or deployment process, everybody is inventing something new. Even within the same company we often saw teams doing similar releases completely differently.

Currently, the most common way managing release process is to setup wiki page somewhere on the corporate network, put release steps in the document, and ask everybody to follow those. Of course, copies and outdated versions will become a problem pretty soon. More advanced approach, is to make release plan (in Excel for example), assign people responsible for each task, and closely monitor execution during the release time. At Coehl we designed a system dedicated specifically to solving release process problems. We integrated planning, role assignment, chat, monitoring and archiving into one system. Every detail is designed to simplify release process. Every step gets monitored and archived; making analysis and postmortems easier.

Some may ask: “why do we need this system if we have a wiki page?” Well, in the early years of the software bugs management was quite different. Bug descriptions were simply send over an email to the engineers, or get written in some common document. It was unproductive and prone to human errors. Today, everybody using bug tracking systems. They can do more, and make development process safer. Same is happening in the release management. Now we are making step from the static TODO lists to the automated release management systems. From documents that might have many copies spread all over the network to a centralized system with monitoring and archiving.

If release management system saves even one outage during the year, it pays for itself. Besides that, it also provides much better organization of the release process and release archiving for the further analysis.