We are building a Wiki of development, build and release terms and as I contribute starter definitions, I am blogging them. Feel free to comment, or wait for the Wiki. Release management is one of the more challenging parts of application development, largely because it is more social than other aspects. Particularly in large organizations, more teams must come together to coordinate a release. Release management includes all the activities surrounding application production changes. It may involve ensuring requirements and change requests are met, reporting and coordination of multiple application teams to test and simultaneously change production. It is often the latter coordination that is the most difficult as it is a coordination and leadership effort requiring consensus as opposed to something entirely electronic or technical.

Release management in the Perl open source community: There is a version naming convention in the Perl community where each contributor of a Perl module cites the versions of other Perl modules it is dependent on. The automated install program that comes with Perl (cpan for CPAN distributions and ppm for ActivePerl) cross checks the user’s version of dependent Perl modules and updates them if necessary. Thus when one installs  a new perl module, they may automatically get updates to a number of existing Perl modules to satisfy the release requirements.

Release management in the Java open source community: There is none, in general. Eclipse has coordinates the simultaneous release of multiple projects in the Europe release. For the wider community, only the Maven Apache project has attempted to record interdependencies between open source Java projects. Maven has built in automation to walk the dependency lists in a manner similar to Perl by reading the dependency lists on http://ibiblio.org/maven