ReleaseTEAM
Delivering Effective Release Management Processes

Back in 1999, when Shawn Doyle founded ReleaseTEAM, his focus was Software Configuration Management (SCM), which eventually laid the cornerstone for the company’s DevOps practice. “Through time, we spanned across different disciplines of DevOps such as change control, requirements management, deployment, and build automation,” reveals Mr. Doyle. As a consulting company specializing in DevOps, ReleaseTEAM addresses technical difficulties faced in the software development lifecycle.The company offers expertise in software development tool sets, including Open Source; SVN, GIT, as well as commercial tools from vendors like Atlassian, IBM, Perforce, Electric Cloud, Gitlab, Smartbear, Tasktop, WanDisco and HP. According to Mr. Doyle, one of the common challenges incurred by clients is issues that reoccur in the operations environment and ReleaseTEAM tackles this through solid DevOps solutions.

Harboring the belief that there are no silver bullets in SCM, ReleaseTEAM has partnered with several big vendors that deliver DevOps tools—from requirements management all the way to operations monitoring. ReleaseTEAM, a tool agnostic firm, comprises of many Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) that are well versed with different toolsets. “Our SMEs can come up with unbiased opinion on the best tools, regardless of the sector. In addition, although ReleaseTEAM’s solutions are customizable in nature, the company believes in deploying tailored solutions only after gauging the customer’s capability and if the client can maintain a customized environment indefinitely,” remarks Mr. Doyle.

Our innovation lab is under constant transformation as we are always devising new and improved ways of integration, customization, and incorporation of addons as part of our toolset

As SMEs, ReleaseTEAM’s consultants also attend industry events throughout the year to be on top of the game regarding the advancements taking place in different open source and commercial tools.“Our innovation lab is under constant transformation as we are always devising new and improved ways of integration, customization, and incorporation of add-ons as part of our toolset,” says Mr. Doyle.

In one instance, the Department of Defense was taking weeks to get a software build into production. After analyzing the company’s operations and development environment, ReleaseTEAM spotted two core problems. Firstly, the client’s development environment took between 4-5 days to produce a build and when a build problem occurred, the whole procedure had to be restarted. As a solution, ReleaseTEAM upgraded the client’s tools, reconfigured their networks, and modernized the hardware which the build system was working on. This brought the build timing down from days to hours. The second snag lay in the operational side, where the client suffered lengthy Q&A cycles after build development. The solution implemented in this scenario wasn’t a tool, but ReleaseTEAM brought together the test diversification and the DevOps group together. This resulted in the formation of a single quality group that the product would have to go through, before it went into operations, saving the company a process period of 4-5 days.

For the near future, ReleaseTEAM’s focus will be on keeping an eye out for new disciplines emerging in the operations and monitoring field. This includes tools that can reconfigure different on demand and cloud environments, maintain cloud environment, and new container tools like Docker.