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Release management approach

Depending on the application release model, development methodologies, and culture of the organization, you see differences in the process and time frame in which organizations deliver software to production. Some organizations take more time moving new features to production because of industry and regulatory compliance. Some have adopted automated testing and code migration technologies to support a more agile delivery model.

Organizations recognize the financial benefit of releasing application features to end users and customers faster than their competitors. Many have adopted a DevOps approach to streamline their software delivery life cycle. DevOps is a collaboration between Development, Quality, and Operations staff to deliver high-quality software to end users in an automated, agile way. Organizations can gain a competitive advantage in the market by continuously delivering new application features to end users. Because DevOps represents a significant change in culture and mindset, not all organizations are ready to embrace DevOps immediately.

Pega Platform™ also includes support for open DevOps integration that uses popular third-party tools such as Jenkins and Microsoft Azure DevOps by providing an open platform with all the necessary hooks and services. With open DevOps integration, you can build a deployment pipeline using third-party tools to automate branch merging, application packaging and deployment, test execution, and quality metric enforcement.

Perform the following tasks as the technical lead on the project:

  • Assess the organization's existing release management processes and tooling. Some organizations might already work with a fully automated release pipeline. Some organizations might use limited automated testing or scripts for moving software across environments. Some organizations might perform all release management tasks manually.
  • Design a release management strategy that moves application features through testing and production deployment according to the organization's release management protocols.
  • Evolve the release management process over time to an automated model, starting with testing processes. This evolution rate depends on the organization's readiness to adopt agile methodologies and rely on automated testing and software, migration tools, and shared repositories.
Note: While setting up your team release management practices, identify a Release Manager to oversee and improve these processes. The Release Manager creates and locks rulesets and ensures incoming branches are merged into the correct version.

Setting up a release pipeline

Even if the organization releases software through automated methods, most organizations have a manual (or semi-automated) release pipeline. 

In the following image, click the + icons to learn more about the DevOps pipeline.

This pipeline highlights developer activities and user activities.

Developer activities include:

  • Unit testing.
  • Sharing changes with other developers.
  • Ensuring changes do not conflict with other changes made by other developers.

Once the developer delivers changes, user activities typically include:

  • Testing new features.
  • Making sure existing features still work as expected.
  • Accepting the software and deploying it to production.

These activities occur whether or not you are using an automated pipeline. The Standard Release process described in Migrating application changes explains the tasks of packaging and deploying changes to your target environments. If you are on Pega Cloud, be aware of certain procedures when promoting changes to production. For more information, see Change management in Pega Cloud Services.

Moving to an automated pipeline

In an organization that deploys software with heavy change management processes and governance, you contend with old ways of doing things. Explain the benefits of automating these processes, and explain that moving to a fully automated delivery model takes time. The first step is to ensure that the manual processes in place, particularly testing, are effective. Then, by automating over time, a fully automated pipeline emerges.

A DevOps pipeline consists of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment stages and automated processes to quickly move applications from development through testing to deployment. 

When discussing DevOps, the terms continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous delivery frequently apply.

Use the following definitions for these terms:

  • Continuous integration: Continuously integrating into a shared repository multiple times each day.
  • Continuous delivery: Always ready to deliver.
  • Continuous deployment: Continuously deploying or shipping (no manual process involved).

Automation and validation of testing processes are essential in an automated delivery pipeline. Create and evolve your automated test suites by using Pega Platform features and industry testing tools. Otherwise, you automate the promotion of code to higher environments, which might introduce more costly bugs.

For more information about the DevOps pipeline, see DevOps release pipeline overview.

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