Software applications must continually develop and change if they are to keep up with continually developing and changing platforms. Such applications require dedicated resources to
oversee the integration and flow of development, testing, deployment, and support. Release management is a relatively new but rapidly growing discipline within software engineering. Release managers control and manage all of the stages involved in a software release, including the integration of the new developments into ever-changing systems.
Agile software development is widely believed to be amongst the best software engineering solutions leading to higher qualities of releases. With the increasing popularity of agile development, a new approach to software release known as Continuous Delivery is starting to influence how software transitions from development to a release. One goal of Continuous Delivery is to release more reliable applications faster and more frequently. The movement of the application from a “build” through different environments to production as a “release” is part of the automated and well-monitored Continuous Delivery procedure.
In context of Continuous Delivery, perhaps it is the least challenging to distribute client software to all users as well as uninstall and decommission the old applications. Within Continuous Delivery, release managers are beginning to utilize tools such as application release automation and continuous increased reliance on release management and automation tools to execute the complex application release processes. For example, most of the applications in a cloud environment are deployed and delivered by container technology. A container is a standard unit of software that packages up code and all its dependencies so that the application runs quickly and reliably form one environment to another. It is a lightweight, standalone, executable package of software that includes everything needed to run an application: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, and settings. Containers isolate software applications from its environment and ensure that it works uniformly despite difference for instances between development, testing, and delivery. The containerized software will always run the same, regardless of the ever-changing systems.
In summary, in context of agile software development, I think it is more challenging to implement other steps.