Terminology

Before you get started with Release Control, here are some terms you should know.

• Release Packages

  Release packages manage portions of IT or service infrastructure normally built, deployed, tested, and released together. Release packages define the set of changes to be released and drive the release processes.

• Release Trains

  Release trains manage a set of release packages from concept approval through scheduling and scoping, construction, verification, and deployment.

• Approvals

  Approvals may be required to allow a release train to proceed to the final release stage; to validate that a release train may exit a stage based on stage gate exit criteria; and to confirm that pre-defined milestones for release trains have been reached by a certain date.

• Requests

  Requests can be submitted that represent work items in response to a business need.

• Deployment Tasks

  Deployment tasks include the details of what is to be deployed, what order they are to be deployed in, and what needs to be done before, during, and after they are deployed.

• Task Templates

  Task templates store commonly-used sets of deployment tasks. These can be applied to release packages to ease configuration and keep consistency from deployment to deployment.

• Environments

  Environments are logical representations of the physical environments used by your organization. Typical environments include testing, staging, and production.

• Deployment Paths

  Deployment paths are sequences of environments through which release packages progress during the release cycle.

• Provider Plugins

  Provider plugins enable you to access objects in integrating products directly from Release Control. Several plugins are provided as part of the default installation.