What tools and methods do you use to track and monitor release deployment progress and quality?

To keep track of our individual releases, we rely on JIRA dashboards, which allow us to monitor key stats and metrics. To streamline our process, we've created a specific issue type in JIRA called "Release" Within this ticket, we can view essential information like the testing pass percentage, planned release date, actual release date, and type of release. To get a more comprehensive picture of our release performance, we use the Jira dashboard, which presents this information in an intuitive, graphical format. By analysing the metrics shown on the dashboard, we can quickly determine whether our releases are going according to plan, and identify areas where we need to improve, such as testing pass percentage and coverage percentage.

We use the JIRA boards and dashboard to plan & track our releases. I have built a JIRA board aggregating items from multiple projects (teams) tagged with the current release. These items include stories, tasks and bugs. We review this board weekly and daily when we are close to a release. This board provides a holistic picture of pending items. I also have a dashboard that lists completed and pending items. Finally, I use the JIRA plan for looking at the roadmap and big picture (quarterly plans). We can plan, estimate, and track our releases using these JIRA tools. Apart from JIRA, I also use Lucid chart and OneNote as an additional tools to plan & track high-level items.

Release checklists are very crucial for any deployment. It allows my team to ensure we are not missing any significant steps. It also allows us to make choices once and reuse those repeated steps and decisions. We have built our checklist in Confluence. For every release, we make a new confluence page using a template and then add all the steps & release details to this page. This checklist page also ensures we follow all the steps, such as submitting a change order, sending various communications, collecting all the GitHub tags, deployment steps and sequence of those deployments - such as SQL first, then backend API code, then frontend etc. We also use the JIRA release tag to check that all the items are ready for release.

I would be interested to hear you prospective of the 'release checklist' tasks, compared the to individual story tasking. Are they basically the same? We have stories in a sprint all with different deployment steps or activities with a set order. Are you simply viewing them(release numbers or status)on a dashboard that is built of a set release, that is made up of M number of stories and their tasks?

In addition to tracking stats and metrics, the Jira Release dashboard can also generate reports in various formats, such as PDF or Excel. Atlassian provides several plugins that make this process even easier. Furthermore, we can use the graphical views provided by easyBI to present our data in a visually appealing way. These visualizations can help us quickly identify trends or patterns in our release performance and make data-driven decisions about how to improve our processes. Overall, these features make it easier for us to keep track of our releases, generate reports, and make informed decisions about how to improve our products and processes.

Release Review meeting is one of the critical steps to ensure the quality of the release. It helps to mitigate risk through different angle of the views, reduce the possible dependency impacts. We also using DDRR (deep diving release review) to review the issues raised during regular Release Review meeting to deep dive into the possible risk and explore solution. Release Review meeting can use different formats, and can adopt a combination of different formats. Team can sign off lower risk changes off line, while zoom meeting to discuss the higher risk changes. In certain environment, it also can be in email format. Release manager would decide which format to use under different settings.