Besides version control systems, are there any tools that support release management? [closed]

Question

Most of the time, I've seen release management handled as a defined process with the supporting tool as the version control system (usually via branching and tagging). However, are there any tools dedicated to release management? I'm looking for both open source and closed source tools, if any exist.

Answer 1

Release management transcends tools, but that doesn't mean you can't put together an environment to support your RM processes and strategy. We rely heavily on Visual Studio TFS for our RM approach, since it supports build automation, SCM, QA (testing), and integrates with SharePoint 2007 for documentation purposes.

Our RM workflow is hosted in SharePoint as well. This is all very dependent on the Microsoft stack, obviously, but there are equivalent OSS tools.

ETA: Our RM approach is based somewhat heavily on ITIL v2, so it might be more rigid than what you are asking for.

Answer 2

You can use ant or maven for automating tasks like generating packages and deploys to remote servers.

Answer 3

By definition, Release Management is a managed process. I've seen larger organizations use HP Service Manager for process management in this area. They have a Release Control module that works with the Change Management module.

On a more java development side of the house I've seen the Artifactory plugin used with Jenkins. http://blogs.jfrog.org/2011/06/jenkins-new-maven-and-gradle-release.html