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Now whenever Microsoft makes changes to the mappings in Intune, the MDM Support column in the GP analytics tool automatically updates to reflect the changes. The automation is an improvement over the previous behavior, which required you to reimport your Group Policy object GPO to refresh the data.

We have made service side updates to custom notifications for Intune's November service release which require users to have updated to recent versions of the Android Company Portal version 5.

If users do not update prior to Intune's November service release and they are sent a custom notification, they will instead receive a notification telling them to update their app to view the notification. Once they update their app, they will see the message sent by your organization in the Notifications section in the app.

For related information, see Send custom notifications in Intune. As previously announced in October , support for using locations in device compliance policy for devices enrolled as Android device administrator was deprecated. Use of locations is often referred to as network fencing.

For Android device administrator, the policies and dependences that relied on network fence capabilities no longer function. As previously announced, we are re-envisioning support for network fencing and will share more information about those plans when it becomes available. This feature is in public preview and will roll out to tenants gradually over the next few weeks.

You can confirm your tenant has received this capability when the relevant toggles show in both the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. Security Management with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a new configuration channel you use to manage the security configuration for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint MDE on devices that do not enroll into Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

The devices are joined to your Azure AD and are also visible in the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center alongside other devices you manage with Intune and Configuration Manager. Previously, if a user completed MFA as part of their device registration, the MFA claim was carried over to the user state after registration was complete.

Last week we made a change to the authentication experience during user enrollment for Autopilot. This change impacts all Autopilot deployments where a user is assigned to a specific device prior to going through enrollment. We made a change to the Windows Autopilot self-deployment mode and pre-provisioning mode experience, adding in a step to delete the device record as part of the device re-use process.

This change impacts all Windows Autopilot deployments where the Autopilot profile is set to self-deployment or pre-provisioning mode. This change will only affect a device when it is re-used or when it is reset and attempts to redeploy. For more information, see Updates to the Windows Autopilot sign-in and deployment experience. In light of our continued commitment to bring commercial customers the best possible experience, we partnered with teams across Microsoft to streamline Surface management into a single view within Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

Whether you lead a large organization with thousands of devices or manage IT for a small-medium business, you can gain insights into the health of all your Surface devices and monitor device warranty and support requests in one location.

Microsoft Surface management portal is available to U. For more information, see Data Transfer and Universal Links.

You can now allow users to turn on Connected apps experiences for supported apps. This app configuration setting enables users to connect the app information across the work and personal app instances.

For more information, see Add app configuration policies for managed Android Enterprise devices. In device configuration, you can create a list of personal apps that will be blocked or allowed on the device. You can choose to leave the setting as not configured, or create a list of blocked or allowed apps in the personal profile. For information about Android Enterprise corporate-owned work profile device settings, see Android Enterprise device settings to allow or restrict features using Intune.

Four new shared iPad settings are available in Intune for public preview. These settings are applied at the time of automated device enrollment. For iPadOS They can't sign in with a Managed Apple ID. Management capabilities include:.

You can now use the settings catalog to manage Windows Update settings for quality security updates for Windows Enterprise multi-session VMs. To find the settings you can use with multi-session VMs in the settings catalog:. Create a device configuration policy for Windows 10 that uses the settings catalog, and configure Settings filter for Enterprise multi-session. Next, expand the Windows Update for Business category to select from the update settings that are available for multi-session VMs.

In the Android Company Portal app, when users download a copy of the Android Company Portal logs, they will now be able to choose which folder the logs will be saved in. Intune will no longer display a Wi-Fi MAC address for newly enrolled personally-owned work profile devices and devices managed with device administrator running Android 9 and above.

Google is requiring all app updates to target API 30 by November With this change, Android prevents apps from collecting the MAC address used by the device.

For related information, see Hardware device details. You can use Feature updates for Windows 10 and later policy to upgrade devices that meet the Windows 11 minimum requirements to Windows It's as easy as configuring a new feature updates policy that specifies the available Windows 11 version as the feature update you want to deploy.

For more information, see Upgrade devices to Windows The Work from anywhere report in Endpoint analytics now provides Windows 11 hardware readiness insights. You can quickly determine how many of your enrolled devices meet the minimum system requirements for Windows 11 and which requirements are the top blockers within your organization.

Drill in for a device-level view for Windows 11 hardware readiness status. For more information, see Windows 11 hardware readiness. We have improved the UX of Microsoft Endpoint Manager by creating categories of apps that you can use to more easily and quickly target app protection policies. These categories are All public apps , Microsoft apps , and Core Microsoft apps. After you have created the targeted app protection policy, you can select View a list of the apps that will be targeted to view a list of the apps that will be affected by this policy.

As new apps are supported, we will dynamically update these categories to include those apps as appropriate, and your policies will be automatically applied to all apps in your selected category. If needed, you can continue to target policies for individual apps as well. Block users from erasing all content and settings on device General : Disables the reset option on supervised devices so that users can't reset their device to factory settings.

For more information about macOS device restriction profiles in Intune, see macOS device settings to allow or restrict features using Intune. For more information about Android Enterprise device restriction profiles, see Android Enterprise device settings to allow or restrict features using Intune. A new device restrictions setting for corporate-owned work profile devices prevents users from sharing their work profile contacts with paired Bluetooth devices, such as cars or mobile devices.

Intune enrollment and the Company Portal now supports macOS Older versions are not supported. You can now choose the following Android enrollment types when filtering by OS in the All devices list in Intune:. For more information about Android enrollment types, see Intune reports. In addition to profiles based on templates, you can add a profile based on the Settings catalog to your policy sets.

The Settings catalog is a list of all the settings you can configure. For more information, see Use policy sets to group collections of management objects and Use the settings catalog to configure settings on Windows and macOS devices - preview.

You can now configure Managed Home Screen sign-in settings in device configuration when using Android Enterprise dedicated devices enrolled using Azure AD Shared device mode. You no longer need to use app configuration for these settings. As a bulk device action for Windows devices, use Collect diagnostics to collect Windows device logs from up to 25 devices at a time without interrupting device users.

You can use the Locate device remote action to get the current location of a lost or stolen Android Enterprise dedicated device that is online. For more information, see Locate lost or stolen devices. You can now use the Rename remote action on Android Enterprise dedicated devices. You can rename devices individually and in bulk. When using bulk Rename actions, the device name must include a variable that adds either a random number or the device's serial number.

For more information, see Rename a device in Intune. For a list of available device details available in Intune, see View device details with Microsoft Intune. You can review the status of endpoint security policies for tenant attached devices. The Device Status page can be accessed for all endpoint security policy types for tenant-attached clients. For more information, see Device status for the endpoint security policy types.

These profiles are in preview and manage the same settings as the similarly named profiles you use for devices managed by Intune. You'll find these new profiles when you configure attack surface reduction policy for the Windows 10 and later ConfigMgr platform. Previously, this profile was limited to Tamper Protection for your tenant attached devices. The updated profile now includes settings for the Windows Defender Security Center. You can use these new settings to manage the same details for tenant attached devices that you already manage with the similarly named profile for Intune managed devices.

For more information about this profile, see Endpoint security Antivirus policy. For related information, see Company Portal app notifications. We have released a new Device configuration organizational report.

The Device configuration report allows you to generate a list of profiles in the tenant that have devices in a state of success, error, conflict, or not applicable. You can use filters for the profile type, OS, and state. The returned results will provide search, sort, filter, pagination, and export capabilities. In addition to device configuration details, this report provides resource access details, and new settings catalog profile details.

For related information, see Intune Reports. The new experience guides you to issue-specific troubleshooting insights and web-based solutions, to get you a resolution faster. To learn more about this change, see the our support blog post.

Security baselines and endpoint security profiles have been added to the existing Assignment failures report. The profile types are differentiated using the Policy type column with the ability to filter. Role-based access control RBAC permissions have been applied to the report to filter on the set of policies that an admin can see. The report shows the number of devices in a state of error and conflict for a given profile, with the ability to drill down into a detailed list of those devices or users and further into the setting details.

For more information, see Assignment failures report Operational. Conditional launch now supports a sub-setting of SafetyNet device attestation. If you select SafetyNet device attestation as required for conditional launch, you can specify that a specific SafetyNet evaluation type is used. This evaluation type is a hardware-backed key. The presence of a hardware-backed key as the evaluation type will indicate greater integrity of a device.

Devices that do not support hardware-backed keys will be blocked by the MAM policy if they are targeted with this setting. For more information about SafetyNet evaluation and hardware-backed key support, see Evaluation types in the Android developer documentation. For more information about Android conditional launch settings, see Conditional launch. For related information, see App configuration policies for Microsoft Intune.

Scope tags determine which objects an admin with specific rights can view in Intune. Most newly-created items in Intune take on the scope tags of the creator. This is not the case for Managed Google Play Store apps. You can now optionally assign a scope tag to apply to all newly-synced Managed Google Play apps on the Managed Google Play connector pane. The chosen scope tag will only apply to new Managed Google Play apps, not Managed Google Play apps that have already been approved in the tenant.

You can review and edit the app detection details in the Intune console that are captured from the. When uploading a PKG file, detection rules will be auto-created. Continue by selecting the Line-of-business app type and the App package file containing the.

In Endpoint Manager, you can create filters to target devices based on different properties. Use the Deployment channel setting to deploy the configuration profile to the user channel or the device channel.

If you send the profile to the wrong channel, then deployment can fail. For more information on using a payload in a device profile or a user profile, see Profile-Specific Payload Keys opens Apple developer website. To see the settings you can currently configure, go to iOS and iPadOS device settings to allow or restrict features using Intune. There are new settings you can configure on macOS To see the settings you can currently configure, go to macOS device settings to allow or restrict features.

For more information about this setting, go to iOS and iPadOS device settings to allow or restrict features. For example, you can set the grid size to 4 columns x 5 rows.

Use this setting to add a list of the certificate server domain names used by your certificate. For example, enter srv. On Android 11 and newer devices, if you use the Enterprise Wi-Fi type, then you must add the certificate server names. If you don't add the certificate server names, users will have connection issues. The modern authentication method with Apple Setup Assistant is now out of preview and generally available for use for automated device enrollment.

To help you identify devices that could be impacting user experience, Endpoint analytics shows some scores per device. You'll be able to display and sort by the Endpoint analytics, startup performance, and application reliability scores for each device. For more information, see Per device scores.

The new settings are found as follows under the following four categories in the settings catalog. We've added the capability to the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center to confirm that your Tunnel Gateway servers can access your internal network, without someone having to access the servers directly.

To enable this, you'll configure a new option called URL for internal network access check in the properties of each Tunnel Gateway site. After adding a URL from your internal network to a Tunnel Gateway site, each server in that site periodically attempts to access it, and then reports on the result.

The status for this internal network access check is reported as Internal network accessibility on a server's Health check tab. Status values for this check include:. Your servers will need to upgrade to the latest version of the Tunnel Gateway server software for this feature to work.

The new setting:. For more information about SafetyNet and which devices support hardware-backed key attestation, see Evaluation types in the SafetyNet documentation for Android. All device configuration and endpoint security profiles are now merged into one report.

You can view all the policies applied to your device in the new single report that contains improved data. For instance, you can see the distinction of profile types in the new Policy type field. Also, selecting a policy will provide additional details about settings applied to the device and status of the device. Role-based access control RBAC permissions have been applied to filter the list of profiles based on your permissions.

For more information, see Microsoft Intune reports. We've added two new columns of detail to both the Windows 10 unhealthy endpoints report and the Antivirus agent status report.

You can now customize the thresholds that determine the health status for several metrics of Microsoft Tunnel Gateway. Health status metrics have default values that determine whether the status reports as healthy , warning , or unhealthy. When you customize a metric, you change the performance requirements for the metrics status. You can customize the following metrics:. When you change a threshold value, the change applies to all Tunnel servers in your tenant. You can also select an option to reset all the metrics o their default value.

After you update the thresholds, the values in the Health check tab automatically update to reflect status based on the updated thresholds. You can view health status trends for several Microsoft Tunnel Gateway health metrics in the form of a chart.

The health status trend charts are available for individual servers you select from the Health status page. The same app will install the x64 version of the app on Intel Mac machines. This update includes:. For more information about the certificate connector, including a list of connector releases and updates, see Certificate Connector for Microsoft Intune. See Data collected. Windows is a new service from Microsoft that automatically creates Cloud PCs for your end users. Cloud PCs are a new hybrid personal computing category that use both the power of the cloud and the accessing device to provide a full and personalized Windows virtual machine.

End users can access their Cloud PC from any device and any location. For more information about Windows , see Windows For documentation on how to manage Windows in your organization, see the Windows documentation.

We've added support for user-assigned device configuration policies for Shared iPads for Business. With this change, settings like the home screen layout and most device restrictions assigned to user groups apply to Shared iPad devices while a user from the assigned user groups is active on the device.

The previous connectors remain in support but are no longer available for download. If you need to install or reinstall a connector, install the new Certificate Connector for Microsoft Intune.

Available settings on the Enrollment Status Page are updated from Allow users to collect logs about installation errors to Turn on log collection and diagnostics page for end users to support the Windows Autopilot diagnostics page, available in Windows For more information, see Windows Autopilot: What's new. You can filter the devices that get the update rings policy based on a device property, such as the OS version, device manufacturer, and more.

After you create the filter, use the filter when you assign the update rings policy. The Collect diagnostics remote action lets you collect diagnostics from corporate devices without interrupting or waiting for the end user. Collected diagnostics include MDM, Autopilot, event viewers, registry key, Configuration Manager client, networking, and other critical troubleshooting diagnostics. For more information see Collect diagnostics from a Windows device. For more information, see Windows Autopilot for HoloLens 2.

Endpoint analytics has a new report named Work from anywhere. The Work from anywhere report is an evolution of the Recommended software report. The new report contains metrics for Windows 10, cloud management, cloud identity, and cloud provisioning. Users can now:. The new settings can be found as follows under the following four categories in the settings catalog.

This feature is currently in public preview. For more information, see Update cellular data plan. We've added some improvements to how Intune displays status information about the managed apps that have deployed to users or devices. Existing assignments remain unchanged. The Safari cookies setting is updated to help manage cookies and cross site tracking.

Intune support for Android Enterprise corporate-owned devices with a work profile is now generally available. For more information, see Announcing general availability of Android Enterprise corporate-owned devices with a work profile. When you use filters to assign your policies, you can:.

For more information on what you can do, see List of platforms, policies, and app types supported by filters. In Endpoint Manager, you can create filters to target devices based on different properties, including device name, manufacturer, and more. The enrollment profile name property is available for Android Enterprise devices. To see the filter properties you can configure, go to Device properties, operators, and rule editing when creating filters.

Proactive remediations are script packages that can detect and fix common support issues on a user's device before they even realize there's a problem. To help you easily analyze returned outputs, an Export option was added that allows you to save the output as a. For more information, see Proactive remediations. The Certificates report, which shows the current device certificates in use, has been updated to include better capabilities to search, page, sort, and export the report. For more information about reports in Intune, see Intune reports.

The Microsoft Defender for Endpoint app that supports Microsoft Tunnel functionality on Android is now out of preview and generally available for use. With this change:. If you participated in the preview, update your devices with the new version of Defender for Endpoint from the Google Play store. If you are still using the standalone tunnel app, plan to migrate to the Microsoft Defender for Endpoint app before support for the standalone app ends.

While we know customers get enormous value by enabling tenant attach, there are rare cases where you might need to offboard a hierarchy. For example, you may need to offboard following a disaster recovery scenario where the on-premises environment was removed. Choose the name of the site you would like to offboard, then select Delete. For more information, see Enable tenant attach.

Intune already supports Portuguese from Brazil. It includes the following changes:. For sites that are configured to update automatically, the Tunnel Gateway server will automatically update to the new version.

For sites that are configured to update manually, you'll need to approve the update. The Home , Dashboard , and Apps Overview panes now provide updated tiles to show the number of app installation failures for the tenant. This report includes a Per setting status that:. For more information on the settings catalog, see Use the settings catalog to configure settings on Windows and macOS devices. Support has ended for the Restart remote action on corporate-owned devices with a work profile.

The Restart button has been removed from the Device page for corporate-owned devices with a work profile. If you try to restart devices using bulk device actions, the corporate-owned work profile devices won't restart and those device actions will be marked report as Not supported. Other device types that are included in the bulk device action will restart as normal for that action. This gives users a familiar Windows 10 experience while IT can benefit from the cost advantages of multi-session and use existing per-user Microsoft licensing.

Microsoft Intune lets you manage multi-session remote desktops with device-based configurations like a shared, user-less Windows 10 client. For more information, see Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session remote desktops.

To do so, activate the compliance connector for Jamf. For more information, see Integrate Jamf Pro with Intune for compliance. Microsoft Tunnel Gateway is now generally available With this service release, Microsoft Tunnel Gateway is now out of preview, and generally available.

While the Microsoft Tunnel Gateway server component is out of preview, the following Microsoft Tunnel client apps remain in preview:. In this scenario, using custom settings to configure Microsoft Defender for Endpoint in the VPN profile removes the need to deploy a separate app configuration profile for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. For the following platforms, you can choose to use either the custom settings in the VPN profile or to use a separate app configuration profile for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint:.

The new App Install Status report provides a list of apps with versions and installation details. App installation details are included as separate columns in the list. Additionally, the installation details provide the app install and failure totals for devices and users. You have the ability to sort and search this report as well.

Techniques like Agile development, continuous delivery, DevOps, and release automation have helped optimize release management. The velocity of this process has accelerated recently, to the point where several years ago Amazon passed the mark of 50 million code deployments a year — more than one per second.

As a discipline, it draws from both traditional, business-focused project management and technical knowledge of the systems development life cycle SDLC and the IT Infrastructure Library, a set of practices for IT service management.

Done effectively, release management increases the number of successful releases by an organization and reduces quality problems. Productivity, communication, and coordination are improved, and the organization can deliver software faster while decreasing risk.

These improvements mean the team can repeatedly produce quality software with shorter times to market, which allows the company to be more responsive to the operating environment. Release management also helps standardize and streamline the development and operations process.

The team implements auditable release controls, thus creating a repository for all releases throughout the life cycle. Having a single, well-documented process that must be followed for all releases increases organizational maturity. Increased standardization and the focus on product allow teams to draw more useful lessons from experience and apply them in future releases.

Operations departments appreciate the increased coordination with developers because there are fewer surprises. In short, release management breaks down team barriers across multiple functions in an IT organization. As a result, you can improve product delivery holistically. Cross-functional and technical reviews are essential to minimizing the inevitable pain after go-live.

Over time, however, the software development process came to more closely resemble the product cycle in which products are supported, improved, and repeatedly relaunched over a long lifetime. In this framework, the release was not the end goal of development, but rather a transition point for support and revision.

With this increased complexity came a greater need to coordinate the phases. Release management is part of the larger IT discipline of change management , which deals with the inherent turbulence of software development, where stakeholder requirements seem endlessly fluid and the landscape of compliance and regulation continues to shift.

To navigate this environment, software engineering processes must be well synchronized, and release management helps achieve this. Note: Change management is not to be confused with organizational change, which is the reshaping of culture, turnover of people, and internal restructuring of organizations.

A key function of their job is to help the organization assess risk and impact with impartiality. To develop your change management process, you will find it helpful to have standard ways for proposing project changes and recording changes as they are approved and made. Jumpstart the effort by downloading the following free templates for a change proposal and change management log. A change proposal outlines the type and scale of change, and is often the first step in a change management process.

Describe why the change is needed, expected outcomes and impacts, time and resources required, and any other factors that need to be reviewed. This template also includes space for adding descriptive information as well as sections for calculating costs and benefits. A change management log is a document that tracks who requested what change and when, the status of the change request, its priority, and resolution information. If you need a more thorough record, include other details such as the type and impact of the change.

This log template is designed for keeping track of vital information so that change requests can be easily prioritized, addressed, and referenced later. Not all software is created equal. Functional requirements and quality metrics are stringent, and the software has to go through many layers of approval before it ever gets near a plane. From the repository, the artifacts are released to a client production environment for application deployment.

So, you can think of release management as the glue that holds together the interconnected but distinct tasks that comprise software engineering: design, development, testing, deployment, maintenance, and business and customer requirements. A release comprises more than just the core software engineering functions. While developers obviously view a release as the successful delivery of a finished product, there are several supporting business activities that are also involved, such as training salespeople and customer support staff and advertising and marketing the new release.

These activities need to occur in sync with the release tempo, adding complexity to the release management process. Moreover, release management is not just for newly designed software. Modified software goes through the same process to ensure that the stakeholders get what they want. The actual release can be done manually, or, increasingly, it can be automated, depending on how mature the release management process is.

Amazon uses an automated release process to achieve a new release every second. Historically, weekly, monthly, and quarterly updates have been more typical for software development teams. Releases can come in many different forms: as a physical product in a box, as a download from a website or server, as a push to a device from a mobile app store, or as a seamless update to a web-based application.

All software engineering groups — whether big or small and across all industries — use release management to smooth the process. They may apply it to software used internally or sold as a product. Software engineering groups big and small employ release management across all industries, and they can use the resulting software to run their own product or systems, or to sell as a product in itself to clients.

One of the development approaches most conducive to release management is called DevOps , a term formed by combining development and operations. As its name suggests, DevOps attempts to increase coordination between developers and operations in software engineering by using a combination of automation and monitoring at all stages of software development to decrease time-to-market and improve customer satisfaction. Development Work Order: This is a work order for the development or modification of a software application or system.

DevOps Team: Since the whole point of DevOps is to increase coordination between the development and operations functions, creating a separate team makes the term a misnomer. Despite the name, the term usually refers to key team members on both the development and operations sides who work to coordinate the two functions. Installation Work Order: Similar to a development work order, an installation work order is for the installation of a software application, system, or infrastructure component.

Product Owner: The product owner on a development project is the main stakeholder. Project Manager: A project manager takes charge of the direction for a single product.

Release Manager: The role of the release manager is to plan, coordinate, manage, and schedule all the items that comprise a release. All these items do not necessarily have to originate from the same product. For example, this manager must also coordinate work on any other products that are designed to integrate with the new release. Release Policy: This is a set of rules for how to deploy releases to the live operational environment.

Different release policies apply to different releases, depending on such factors as impact and urgency. Release Record: A release record documents the history of a release, from the planning to the closure of the development process.

Release Unit: This term refers to a set of configuration items that a team simultaneously tests and releases into the live environment to implement approved changes. Service Owner: A service owner takes on high-level accountability for a specific IT service. Quality Manager: A quality manager ensures that a release meets stipulated standards. They may have release managers reporting to them. Release management is sometimes described as a super discipline, because it involves overseeing several interconnected but distinct disciplines, notes configuration management expert Salman Khwaja.

One of the central practices in release management is code management , which is the process of managing changes to computer code. Using code modules or collections of lines of code, code management simplifies and speeds up the act of making changes to code as well as other code-related activities, like maintenance and debugging. One type of code management that constitutes an important aspect of release management is version control.

This refers to the management of code for different releases of the same software for the purposes of comparison and reference. Code management follows many of the principles of records management.

To perform their role effectively, a release manager must foster facilitation and collaboration, mainly between teams but also within teams. Release managers are typically experienced professionals themselves, so they may be called upon to pitch in.

Processes and policies are critical to effective release management. Problems are bound to arise, and, when they do, there must be protocols to address them.

The release manager also functions as a gatekeeper or guardian of the production code. They know every time a code artifact moves out of the organization. Over a number of releases, it becomes possible to measure for productivity and throughput metrics so that the efficiency of release management becomes visible. Common metrics include such things as velocity and burndown rate. Release management typically follows a clearly defined path.

It begins with the creation of an organization-wide release schedule. Some companies may release software updates continuously, but others prefer a set schedule.

Next comes the scheduling of the product or solution release. Release management usually begins at the first stage of the development cycle, when the release manager receives requests for changes or new features.

Upon approval of the request, the team designs the new release and planning begins. The developers build the new software. Post-development, the release enters testing, and the team may make modifications before the release is accepted. Thereafter, the release moves into deployment, where it is made available for full use.

The post-deployment stage is support, in which bugs or user stories that the team documents here may be fed back into the development cycle as material for a new release.

Use the template below for a simple release plan. For especially complex and high-budget projects, the release plan framework developed by the Center for Medicaid Services, which can be downloaded here , is a good reference. Historically, many companies lacked processes to manage the release cycle.

However, because problems can represent a blow to the bottom line, with bugs and crashes costing a lot of time and money as well as reliability and reputation , release management arose as a discipline to address some common challenges.

An efficient release management process can help organizations avoid a number of problems. Organizations that base their software development on popular Agile principles typically produce more frequent releases. The Agile approach to software release is called continuous delivery , a method that aims to create code that is ready for deployment at any time.

It almost completely eliminates the conventional stages of integration and testing and automates the release process on very short cycles. Software product development expert and author Jon Quigley of Value Transformation notes that studies have shown an inverse relationship between project size and success. He also says research suggests that customers do not use 45 percent of developed features. These statistics argue for small, focused releases that prioritize features highly valued by customers.

In continuous delivery, release management remains the critical connector between development and production. Release management verifies the integrity of code and makes sure that it functions as planned. Agile methods break down silos often seen with Waterfall methodologies , but Agile requires thorough documentation, so processes are clear. Continuous delivery is the concept that every change to the code base goes through the pipeline up to the point of deploying to non-production environments.

The team finds and addresses issues immediately, not later, when they plan to release the code base. To effectively and efficiently release the code base to production, release managers rely on three things: automation, a DevOps mindset, and continuous integration. Automation relates mainly to testing functions, while the DevOps mindset vastly improves coordination between development and operations the delivery and infrastructure people may be the same in order to smooth out the potentially abrupt transition from the former to the latter.

Continuous integration, meanwhile, is the practice of developers frequently updating their own working copies of code to a mainline — usually about once a day. Continuous integration relies on a stringent system of automated testing, and it tends to weed out errors quickly and speed up the change process.