ServiceDesk Plus Cloud supports Release Management in the IT help desk. Release management allows you to plan, build, test, and deploy releases to the production environment. A release can be defined as the process of delivering a set of authorized changes to IT services in a controlled environment. You can use release management to deploy hardware, software, documentation, processes, guidelines, policies, and other components to service operations.
You can raise a release request for authorized changes with or without associating a change record in the application. Throughout its life cycle, the release process is closely associated with the change management process. ITSM calls for incrementally building a release with subsequent stages to achieve a streamlined process. Each stage is a significant event or a milestone that involves a major deliverable in a release life cycle.
ServiceDesk Plus Cloud supports the following 9 stages that are essential to any release process:
1. Submission
2. Planning
3. Development
4. Testing
5. UAT
6. Deployment
7. Training
8. Review
9. Closure
Each stage contains statuses that indicate the progress of a release request within the stage. Besides statuses, each stage has its planning and schedule, roles and approvals, and tasks and downtimes.
You can create a release request easily by using pre-configured templates. Release templates help technicians save time and efforts by auto-populating fields with the required data.
Associate workflows with release requests to define the direction of the flow of the release process. You can design workflows for release processes specific to your organization and associate them with release requests.