By: Jon Hyman (@jon_hyman). Originally published on the Engine Yard blog.
Prior to co-founding Appboy, I was a release manager at a large finance company. If someone wanted to release anything to our production environment, my job was to ensure that it was safe with minimal risk. “Safe” varied by product, but it always entailed a few common “checklistable” elements, such as code reviews, user acceptance testing, and ensuring that we had a rollback plan in place.
Some of those steps are automatable, but, as is often the case when working on large, legacy systems, much of this had to be done manually. With multiple releases each week, release management took up a lot of my time.
