Release engineering

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Release engineering, frequently abbreviated as "releng", is a sub-discipline in software engineering concerned with the compilation, assembly and delivery of source code into finished products or other software components. An associated term is software release life cycle. Frequently, tracking of changes in a configuration management system or revision control system is part of the domain of the release engineer. The responsibility for creating and applying a version numbering scheme into software--and tracking that number back to the specific source files to which it applies may fall onto the release engineer. Producing or improving automation in software production is usually a goal of the release engineer. Gathering, tracking, and supplying all the tools that are required to develop and build a particular piece of software may be a release engineering task, in order to reliably reproduce or maintain software years after its initial release to customers.

While most software engineers, or software developers, do many or all of the above as a course of their work, in larger organizations the specialty of the release engineer can be applied to coordinate disparate source trees, projects, teams and components. This frees the developer to implement features in the software and frees quality assurance engineers to more broadly and deeply test the produced software.

The release engineer may provide software, services, or both to software engineering and software quality assurance teams. The software provided may be build tools, assembly or other reorganization scripts which take compilation output and place them into a pre-defined tree structure, and even to the authoring and creation of installers for use by test teams or by the ultimate consumer of the software. The services provided may include software build (compilation) automation, automated test integration, results reporting and production of or preparation for software delivery systems--e.g., in the form of electronic media (CDs, DVDs) or electronic software distribution mechanisms.

An often overlooked task in the software development process is the need to get software from the hands of developers into the test organization. This software is usually called a "release" or "delivery" or, even more casually, a "build" (noun, rather than verb). But in group software development, who delivers all the pieces in a co-ordinated fashion? What, exactly, is in any particular build (differing it from a previous build, at varying stages of development)? What are the processes involved in reliably reproducing the software? Large software projects, whether using agile software development or the waterfall model rely on many and frequent iterations of the build -> test -> debug -> code -> build cycle before the software project is complete. Release engineering attempts to bring consistency, reproducibility and verifiability to the build and release cycle.

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