Position: Release Manager
Company: Atelier Technology
Category: QA Automation
Experience required: 3y
English level: upper
Published: 2022-01-01T00:00:00+02:00

**The Role**
As the Release Manager your BHAG ( Big Hairy Audacious Goal ) is 
“The rapid, reliable and repeatable release of change into production of our software that can be performed daily."
The Release Manager is a crucial aspect of continuous delivery and is accountable for all aspects of the release management lifecycle including scheduling and coordinating releases of our complex system. Focus will be needed on the people, processes and tools to achieve success in this role. 
The changes will include application updates, new features, refactoring, security improvements and others. 
The role of release management starts with the product team, understanding the short, mid and long term roadmap. Then mapping out the releases required to meet the product objectives with the development teams as part of grooming. The role's accountability then tracks through the SDLC to production release.  
The release manager is accountable for creating release plans that are easily implementable and for the release notes needed for internal and external communication. 
The Release Manager needs to create strong relationships with multiple people across the business to work effectively. This will include stakeholders in the change such as Infrastructure & Support, Product, Development & QA.
The Release Manager will live by the process they create, inspect and adapt. To manage risk and uncertainty the release lifecycle relies on solid, well documented and managed processes that bring clarity to the people involved. 
The tools used in the release process will be key to the Release Manager in achieving zero-downtime releases, minimising risk and maximising impact. The Release Manager is knowledgeable in the appropriate devops tools needed for all parts of the release.

**A Typical Day**
You start the day by writing the release plan in confluence for Thursday's release. Your advanced knowledge of our system and release roadmap allows you to identify contingencies, blockers and downtime triggers in the release. Once complete you circulate the plan to sysadmin and tech leads for review.  
Next up you work with development and Sysadmin teams to ensure the release schedule is do-able for the months ahead and you start to address contingencies and potential problems.
After lunch you attend a product roadmap review to understand the mid – long term roadmap changes and objectives. 
Later in the afternoon it is time to ensure the release scheduled for tomorrow has passed all required quality gates, is cab approved and has a green light to proceed. 

**Responsibilities**
Planning and Organization:
- Create clear, structured release plans. 
- Build a Release Calendar, Release windows and cycles, accessible to all key stakeholders through close coordination with the Product delivery team.
- Manage risks and resolve issues that affect release scope, schedule, and quality of releases, continuously monitoring progress to ensure releases are delivered according to the Release Calendar.
- Participate in the Change Advisory Board and any other required meetings to discuss release scope and/or roadblocks.
- Maintain a release repository with an easily accessible overview of a map of versions and manage key information such as build and release procedures, dependencies, and notification lists.
- Identify root causes for failed deployments to ensure avoiding repeated mistakes.
- Implement regular checkpoint and assurance activities for release to monitor, control and progress agreed actions.

People:
- Work across team boundaries including Product Owners and Tech Leads to ensure release and implementation processes are built into programme plans and sprint activities at key points in the development cycle.
- Work collaboratively across teams and respond creatively to tough and every changing challenges within Change and Release Management.
- Experienced at tailoring complex information, to present to a range of audiences, both verbally and in written form.

Processes: 
- Design and iterate release processes.
- Determine what processes and best practices are most suitable.
- Partner with senior engineers to drive technical initiatives that improve our release process.
- Drive process improvements and practices.

Tools:
- Understand and manage the correct devops for the business
- Provide requirements to build automation tools to help in the release process. 

Technical:
- Develop a deep understanding of the system, interactions, constraints and dependencies. 
- Understand the devops tools used to enable release.

**Skills & Experience**
Professional Experience
- Technical background in software development, QA, sysadmin or devops. 
- Advanced knowledge of the software development lifecycle
- 2-3 years of previous Release Management or Service Transition experience
- 5+ years of experience in information systems/operations environment in systems analysis, software development or QA automation
- Advanced knowledge in Release Management in an Agile Software Development environment
- Track record coordinating cross-functional teams towards release objectives
- Knowledge of feature toggles, branch handling, continuous integration, and continuous delivery
 
Technologies we use:
- .NET, C#
- PHP
- Angular, AngularJS
- AWS – ec2, ecs, rds, code deploy
- GCP
- Bitbucket, Bitbucket Pipelines
- GridGain
- MySQL
- Jira, Confluence