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 packages can be organized in a parent-child hierarchy.

• Release Trains

  Release trains manage a set of release packages from concept approval through scheduling and planning, development, quality assurance, and deployment. Release trains can drive the deployment (deployable release trains) or be for planning purposes only (planning release trains).

• Approvals

  Approvals may be required to:

  • Allow a release train to proceed to the final release stage
  • Validate that a release train may exit a stage based on stage gate exit criteria
  • Confirm that pre-defined milestones for release trains have been reached by a certain date
  • Allow a release train or release package deployment request to proceed in an environment
• Requests

  Requests are release work items or technical or business requirements. These are populated from external tools through provider plugins.

• 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. These are executed by external tools through provider plugins.

• Deployment Units

  Deployment units are packaged sets of deployment-ready files and metadata that is associated with a deployment task. These are populated from external tools through provider plugins.

• Task Templates

  Task templates store commonly-used sets of deployment tasks. These can be applied to release packages or deployable release trains 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. These can be organized into environment groups. Deployment tasks may be scheduled and approved into environments and environment groups.

• Deployment Paths

  Deployment paths are sequences of environments through which release packages progress during the release cycle. Parallel deployment is supported through environment groups.

• Plugins

  Plugins enable you to access objects in integrating products directly from Release Control. Several plugins are provided as part of the default installation and you can create your own custom plugins to meet your organization's needs.