Jira Release Management: How to improve your release process using release templates

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A release isn't just an application switch. There is much more happening under the hood.

How many times someone told you they just push to production and release is done? Maybe from their side, but there is a much bigger picture we should understand, plan and track when we're delivering a product to our customers.

Development release stages

In product delivery, we can treat stages as quality gates. Changes usually move through different environments where the quality checks are done and it all ends with the production release.

Example stages of the development release process

It's a cross-team effort

Well, it's not only about development. Usually, you have many teams aiming towards a single goal - release or in other words - launch. Each of them contributes to the release in a different way.  

Let's have a look at an example. To deliver a new web app to the users, the release first goes through design, then it's passed to development and testing. In the meantime, the Marketing team is preparing strategy and content to make sure the Launch date isn't postponed to wait for them.

Example of stages that application release goes through in order to be launched to users.

All teams are busy and need to finish their part on schedule. Even a small delay means blocking the next team to start and pushing the launch date. To be able to identify bottlenecks and prevent slipping of the releases it's good to track not only overall release status but also the statuses of its phases.

Not all releases are alike

Release stages are great, but creating them in a way they fit for every single release and every single client is hard.

But that should be simple enough to solve with release templates. Let's take our web application example again. We identified these types of releases or templates:

• MVP - the initial launch of application or its features,
• Improvements - small improvements and bug fixes,
• Hotfixes - Major bug fixes that need to get live ASAP.

Example of different types of application releases

But you can also create types based on the environments (web app, mobile, UI-library) or based on your clients.

Time to create your Release template

Having a stable release process where the length of each stage is planned gives many opportunities for future improvement and success with delivering on time.

If your development team already uses Jira, you can try our app, Swanly - Release Management Timeline.

In Swanly you can create your release templates and track release progress on the timeline or the list. Visit our marketplace listing to start 30 days free trial and learn more.

Smash it with releases  

Releases are the core of every project and it is crucial to understand their stages. On top of that, enhancing the release management will speed up the overall delivery process. It will save time for all teams, involved in the game.

This post was created by Jexo team and is also available on our blog.

[Zoryana Bohutska _SaaSJet_]

nice article)

[Nikki Zavadska _Appfire_]

Thank you @Zoryana Bohutska _SaaSJet_ ! :)

[Volker Scholl]

Is there any chance to build such a solution without Swanly? 

[Nikki Zavadska _Appfire_]

Hi @Volker Scholl

In Jira, you can't assign any tags or create stages for your releases by default.

You could build something similar using an external release management application like Plutora or look for a different release management plugging on Atlassian marketplace.

Swanly plugin is specializing in templating and visual planning. If you're not satisfied with the current version of Swanly you can have a look at what changes are coming to the app in few weeks time here 🚀