As organizations go through a DevOps transformation, they start to practice Continuous Delivery and release software more frequently. They often find that their teams need to manage many releases running at the same time, with potentially complex dependencies on one another. To avoid time-consuming delays when getting their software to users, these teams need a fast and easy way to spot potential problems before they slow down or even stop the release flow.

To meet this need, XL Release provides Risk Intelligence that identifies and highlights warning signs during a release to indicate when it is not on track. With XL Release, everyone involved in a release can immediately see when a release might be in trouble — no matter what their role is. XL Release uses a seven-factor risk assessment to assign a risk score to every running release, giving teams a heads-up as soon as potential problems and delays arise.

Defining the meaning of risk

But all releases are not the same, and risk factors can mean different things in different contexts.

• For example, retrying failed tasks during a release to a Development environment might not be a cause for concern; but retrying tasks when releasing to Production is a sign that something is not right in the release process.
• Different business units within your organization may have differing views on risk; for example, delays during infrequent releases of a mainframe application are not as risky as delays during continuous releases of a high-profile mobile app.

Accurately identifying and evaluating risk in all of the different situations that your organization faces – in the right context – is a challenge.

XL Release 7.5 helps you meet that challenge by allowing you to customize its Risk Intelligence based on your business needs. In XL Release, you can create Risk Profiles that give you full control over:

• the way it uses factors such as release or task flags
• alerts generated by overdue tasks or releases
• the way impending release failures are highlighted
• the way risk score is calculated based on the number of task retries

With Risk Intelligence customization, you can be sure the releases that need the most attention always bubble to the top of your release overview, giving you the visibility that you need and providing intelligent, context-sensitive insight into your release’s true risk.

XL Release provides a default risk profile to help you get started; you can customize and create new risk profiles based on the default profile to fit your environments, teams, technologies, and applications.

Process risk at bigger scale

Customizable Risk Intelligence also includes a global risk threshold, so you can be sure that teams have the flexibility to create the profiles they need, while still meeting your organization’s compliance policies. An admin can set global values for risk thresholds that serve as a reference for all risk profiles.

Setting up risk profiles

Step 1: Assign scores to risk factors

In a profile, you assign a score to each risk factor based on its severity for that profile. You can even disable risk factors that do not suit your needs.

Step 2: Apply risk profiles to templates and releases

Once you have risk profiles in place, you can assign them to specific templates and releases. When a release is running, XL Release will use the profile to calculate the release’s risk score. By default, releases with the highest risk scores appear at the top of the Release Overview, ensuring that they’re easily visible every time you log in to XL Release.

Step 3: Changing your risk profiles

Risk Intelligence can evolve with your organization. As your Continuous Delivery needs change and your release processes evolve, you can update the factors in a risk profile, and even assign a new profile to a template or release.

Make use of Risk Profiles to manage releases in trouble

You can find the risk score on the release dashboard for your releases, along with a breakdown of the individual factors that are contributing to the score. Using this information, you can easily spot “At Risk” releases, and, hopefully, take whatever action is necessary in time to remediate that risk.

Get a Free Trial

To see how risk score customization can help your teams deliver faster, check out a free 30-day trial of XL Release.

Related Resources

• XL Release product page
• XebiaLabs DevOps Platform 7.5: Scalable DevOps for the Enterprise

The post Take Control of Your Release Processes with Customizable Risk Intelligence appeared first on XebiaLabs Blog.