Release Coordinator in DevOps

A relatively new role in enterprise IT which is primarily tasked with coordinating deployments of enterprise software to pre-production environments. The need for the release coordinator has been driven by:

·         The need to fill the DevOps “gap”

·         Increased infrastructure complexity  -  multiple layers and platforms which form web applications.

·         Growth in rate of release – due to agile and iterative development.

·         Distributed teams – globally deployed, outsourced and hybrid environment, testing and infrastructure teams.

The release co-ordinator role (referred  to as a  deployment or integration co-ordinator) has emerged from the release management or release engineering teams. This role is similar to an air traffic controller  - performing real time co-ordination activities across diverse teams to achieve  a group goal using shared resources .

Release co-ordination contrast with release management, which is often focused on planning and reporting on software changes, in order to control the release of specific application changes into production. Release engineering is concerned with the systematic and technical work related to building and deployment code into enviroments.