In the fast changing business environment Release Management solutions are the most important ones for the Software Development Life Cycle.

Today’s software consists of various components, built in different programming languages and run on  several platforms. Development process often affects many of, or even all the component simultaneously. One business requirement for a change impacts several software components.

Now it is more important that ever before to implement changes by releases, identified with release ids, controlling lists of implemented modifications, keeping track of affected components and required infrastructure changes.

Each new implementation will require a software build in its certain form. Repetitive builds can be time consuming and require skilled personal. That is why many companies are concerned with build stability and invest their efforts into software build automation process.

When a build is automated, it fully performs all the steps without a manual involvement in the correct sequence. It may use parameters to build particular artifacts by request. Traditionally a build is developed in form of an execution tree comprised from build targets tied as dependencies. This approach is used by Make utility and Ant tool.

A build developed as an incremental will help to rebuild only updated code and package it, rather than do everything from scratch. That will reduce the build time when a patch is applied.

Development of build scripts is associated with reusing of build targets which is intended to reduce number of redundant or duplicated pieces. Redundancy and duplication will eventually complicate build maintenance and hence its cost. Reusing of build scripts is a preferred practice since it encourages to use proven working components and reduces development efforts.

Utilizing proper tools for release, configuration and build management is an important approach in the process of Software Development.