What’s Release Engineering?

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Release engineering, or releng, is the process of preparing complete software for distribution. This can involve many separate programming and engineering disciplines, and not all release engineering definitions are the same across different companies. Some of the activities that may be involved in release engineering include compiling source code, monitoring and maintaining development tools and environments, maintaining a release library over the life of a program, and sometimes implementing software distribution on a server or live system. Some of the benefits of having a dedicated release engineer in the software development cycle are a better experience for end users, as release methods are tested first, better overall program documentation during updates, and some sort of quality control in situations where different parts of a program come from separate sources.

During software development, there comes a time when the application is completed and must be distributed to customers or installed on a live server in order to be used. Without a release engineer, this process might involve developers building a program using developer tools and then moving the binaries to the target media or server. Some of the problems you may encounter with this process are that the program may have unquantified dependencies, that some changes may be forgotten, or ultimately that the process may not necessarily be reproducible in the future.

One of the biggest parts of release engineering is tracking the progress of how a program develops. This could mean using a versioning system or employing other software to not only track and label each step of a program during its development, but also to store snapshots of the program so they can be recalled later. In addition to managing only the source code, creating a successful program requires that information about the tools used and the various libraries or other resources used is also stored. The ultimate goal is to be able to recompile a program at any stage of its development, regardless of the development systems used to create it.

Another possible part of release engineering is preparing an application for distribution to customers. Once the program has been compiled into binaries, methods of getting the program installed on an end user’s computer are developed and explored. This might involve writing an installer or testing the program in different situations if it is active to ensure that it works within specifications. Release engineering sometimes involves installing a program multiple times on multiple systems to ensure that different configurations or errors are handled correctly.

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