Who Is a Release Manager? Job Role & Responsibilities and Pay Scale?

IT business is booming and the technologies are getting better and stronger every passing minute. DevOps is one such methodology which is being adopted and facilitated by a long lineage of professionals and businesses. DevOps involves a proper mindset through which the designing and implementation of the software systems can be automated and agility of the whole process can be promised. It brings about the union of development and operational side of things so that software and tools or their updates can be rolled out to the end-users in a much more efficient way.

DevOps is all about communication of teams to discuss what is hindering the possible release of the updates and how they can grow past these difficulties. That is the main reason why businesses are hiring release managers for DevOps. It’s so that they can help in the proper scheduling of which projects should be designed and which one of these should be implemented or released. The whole itinerary and timeline must be designed and brought in by these professionals.

Release Manager Vs DevOps Release Manager

A general release manager role means that a professional is responsible for managing the entire software development lifecycle. They have to work with the same team for the efficient planning, development and deployment of the apps/software systems. Testing, development and deployment of these systems is the sole responsibility of these professionals.

On the other hand, the DevOps release manager not only works with the IT development and operations team from time to time but is also responsible for laying out a dedicated release cycle, planning the shorter feedback and then time scheduling of the fast releases. They have to work with the teams from the start of the project until its end, and they also have to propose timelines and priorities according to which a particular project should be picked and worked at. Various agile methodologies such as ITIL and SCRUM must be implemented and used by the DevOps release managers. This way, if any incident arises, these can be properly assessed and then neutralized at the same time.

The Job Description of the Release Manager

• The release manager will have to report to the manager within the DevOps management team. The DevOps release manager is responsible for the planning, controlling as well as scheduling of the development and delivery process for various software, tools and updates.
• As a release manager, you are responsible for handling the DevOps teams for making them deliver the services on time and also for the management of both IT operations and developers
• As you are a release manager then it means that you will have to work with the testing team, development, and deployment team to work towards beating the software release deadline. You will have to conduct the release of the updates or the software that was under development when you have done effective testing on the final version of the software to the end customers.
• You will have to manage the revenue of the release and for that will have to define the strategic usage of the release management tools
• Overall, you will be dealing with the development, testing, and deployment teams for tracking the effective release of the software systems, also to begin with you will be conducting the risk assessment and managing any virtue or fraction of the risk that lingers along throughout the whole operation

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Release Manager Roles and Responsibilities

Much of your time will be spent on planning, testing and tracking the release of the software that you are currently working on. The following are some of the roles that you will have to abide by:

• Planning the release of the project deliverables and on the release life cycle
• Communicating with various different teams on a day to day basis for discussing with them the plans, timelines and requirements for various tasks that need to be done
• Coordination of the release schedule, resources required depending on the third-party applications, defect backlogs, planned releases and infrastructure updates are also some of the coordination related tasks that need to be taken care of by this professional
• Identification of the risks that can delay the release schedules, quality of the release or other various defects need to be observed and disclosed by this professional ahead of time so that these problems can be removed or taken care of already
• Tracking of the overall progress and reporting of the issues is also done by this professional and also the removal of any bad element that might hinder with the speed of the project also falls on the shoulders of this professional
• Planning and giving weekly updates on the release activities is also among the added responsibilities of these professionals

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