About the Approvals Process App

Approvals help enforce processes and bring accountability to your release management activities. Approvals may be required to allow a release train to proceed to final deployment stages; to validate that a release train may exit a stage based on gate exit criteria; and to confirm that pre-defined milestones for a release have been reached by a certain date.

Release managers determine approval needs during the Plan stage of a release train. Release approvals are added and managed from release trains; the Approvals process app stores approvals and determines the approval process.

The following approval types are provided:

E-mail notifications for each type are configured so that recipients can approve or reject directly from the e-mail they receive.

The approval types, including example milestones, are shown in the following figure.

Release Approval

Release Approval is intended for approval boards that need to approve a release train to be deployed to the final environment, often referred to as Production.

Note: Release Approval can be done by individual users, but not groups.

Gate Approvals

Release managers can use gate exit criteria to require individuals to approve a train to exit a certain stage. Exit criteria may be added for each gate, Scoping, Construction, and QA. For example, the QA gate may have exit criteria for successful test automation runs. If exit criteria is added for a gate, approval is required before the train can continue past that gate.

The gate completion date is automatically used as the due date for associated exit criteria. If the schedule for a gate is changed, the due dates for any exit criteria for that gate can be automatically updated as well.
The release manager is responsible for creating exit criteria for each gate. Exit criteria owners are responsible for ensuring exit criteria are completed.
Use the Timeline view for release trains to monitor gates and exit criteria.

Note: Gate exit criteria are added and managed from release trains, while the Approvals process app stores these items and determines their process.

Milestone Approvals

Milestones are date-based activities against which release train progress can be measured. For example, you may create a milestone for completing drafts of technical documentation.

You can set completion dates and owners for each milestone.
Milestone owners are responsible for completing or rejecting milestones.
Use the Timeline view for release trains to monitor milestone activities.

Related Topics

Creating Approval Items