TFS Release Management - Seperation of release responsibilties

Question

I've been looking at improving the deployment strategy in our department and the latest TFS release management tools look great for this. Allowing multiple release stages, and authorisations for that stage; however but the company I work for has extremely tight governance and so the development team must on no account ever look (or even think) about the UAT or production environment. That is handled by a separate team at the other end of the country.

So the question is can TFS Release Management allow for different profiles on different environments. I.E. Team X can deploy to Development & Test however only members of Team Y can initiate a release to UAT or PROD?

Answer 1

Yes.

Take a look at the Release Path. There, you can select the person or group responsable of accepting a deployment to be done within a stage. Hence, they become the owner of that stage. They decide if and when a specific Release (build) is to be deployed in their environment.

Also, you can set up security so that one team can modify the Deployment Sequence within Release Templates only for selected Stages. They will be able to see the other stages, but not modified it. This security can be defined in a Security tab of a Group.