How to streamline your release cycle for faster updates

Highlights

You’ll learn about why companies need a release cycle:

• Staying competitive: Release cycles ensure timely, stable updates, keeping your product ahead
• Risk mitigation: Early issue detection reduces the chance of major setbacks
• Improved collaboration: Enhances teamwork across development, testing and operations
• Enhanced user experience: Regular updates based on user feedback improve satisfaction
• Continuous improvement: Promotes ongoing enhancements, maintaining software relevance and quality

Streamline your release cycle with Contentstack and stay ahead in the market.

The average product undergoes an extensive journey from ideation to general product release. Converting your ideas or notions into working prototypes, tested and improved repeatedly before the final release, is quite an extensive journey. However, timely and efficient release cycles are critical for your project’s success. Why? They ensure your product gets delivered to the market promptly, with new features and improvements that meet your customer demands. 

It’s not simple to choose the right release cycle for your product. Scroll down to learn more and understand how to choose the right cycle.

What is a release cycle?

A release cycle is a series of steps your software product undergoes, from its initial concept phase to its alpha version for market delivery. The cycle includes various stages:

• Planning
• Development
• Testing
• Staging
• Deployment
• Maintenance

Each stage ensures the final release product meets the specified requirements and aligns with your customers' expectations and market demands. When you focus on a well-defined release cycle, you:

• Improve team collaboration
• Reduce risks associated with software deployment
• Streamline your software development life cycle

A release cycle is a life cycle of developing, testing and deploying a product update or new features into a production release. Through release cycles, you ensure new features and updates meet your customer requirements and are stable enough to be used by your target audience. Interestingly, this cycle provides valuable feedback for improving the future version of the software. 

What are the release cycle stages?

Planning

Planning is the heart of a successful software release life cycle. During the planning phase, you define what you want to achieve, set clear goals and lay out your timelines. Key activities include:

• Creating a roadmap for the release version
• Crafting project plans
• Allocating resources
• Predicting expected outcomes

These activities ensure your feature or update aligns with your business goals. 

Development

In the development stage, coding starts. You bring features and functionalities from your plans to life and test the features or updates before a major release. During this phase, developers use tools like version control and bug-tracking software to manage their development process while properly documenting it. 

Testing

Testing is important because it ensures your software works as expected and meets quality standards, ensuring a seamless user experience. The testing phase focuses on different types of testing, including:

• Unit testing
• Beta testing
• Integration testing
• System testing
• A/B testing
• User acceptance testing (UAT)

Staging

In the staging environment, you put the software in a setting that resembles the real world. Typically, this is the final alpha testing phase; validation happens before your product reaches the market. During the staging phase, you:

• Fix any last bugs
• Conduct performance testing
• Run security checks

Deployment

The final phase of the release cycle is deployment. During the deployment phase, you release the product, update or feature to the production. The phase includes various steps:

• Deploying the code to the servers
• Updating the release to your customers
• Fixing bugs
• Configuring the environment

Maintenance

After deploying, you need to maintain the code deployed. During the maintenance stage, you:

• Monitor performance
• Tackle any issues or bugs
• Implement updates and enhancements to keep everything running smoothly.

Types of release cycles

Continuous release

A continuous release cycle uses continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD). As a result, you roll out new features and updates when they’re ready. This release cycle ensures quick delivery and immediate feedback, helping you respond to customer needs and market shifts. 

Ideal for: Companies that focus on agility and efficiency.

Scheduled release

Scheduled releases stick to a calendar where you launch updates and features regularly. This approach gives your development team and customers a clear timeline, making planning and coordinating efforts easier. 

Ideal for: Large companies or projects that have strict compliance requirements.

Agile release

Agile release cycles embrace agile development principles, focusing on steady progress and delivering in small, manageable chunks. Your team releases features and updates at the end of each sprint, promoting flexibility and continuous improvement. As a result, your teams easily adapt to changing priorities and feedback.

Ideal for: Teams that prioritize flexibility and continuous improvement.

Monthly releases

With monthly release cycles, you deliver updates and enhancements on a monthly schedule. This release helps you with rapid iterations. Additionally, you thoroughly test your iterations and provide a consistent stream of improvements without overwhelming either the development team or the users. 

Ideal for: Software-as-a-service (SaaS) models, where regular updates and bug fixes are essential.

Quarterly releases

Quarterly release cycles give your teams room for development and testing, allowing for updates and features. Each quarter, you deliver a beta version of a substantial release that you thoroughly review before going live.

Ideal for: Projects that need extensive planning and teamwork.

One-week release cycle

A one-week release cycle is common in fast-paced startup environments, which means updates and new features are rolled out weekly. The quick release keeps your product evolving and competitive. This cycle relies on a highly efficient development process to provide quality and stability.

Ideal for: Startups planning to maintain a competitive edge through rapid innovation

Why do companies use release cycles?

Staying competitive

Release cycles help you roll out stable releases with new features and improvements, allowing you to stay ahead in the market.

Mitigating risk

With a structured release cycle, companies can spot and tackle issues early on, minimizing the chance of major setbacks.

Improving collaboration

Release cycles foster good collaboration among your development, testing and operations teams. Everyone focuses on achieving project goals. 

Enhancing user experience

When you release updates, you gather user feedback, beta test them and continuously improve the user experience.

Ensuring continuous improvement

Release cycles promote a culture of ongoing enhancements to software products, ensuring the software is relevant and of high quality.

How can Contentstack help you with the release cycle?

Contentstack offers excellent solutions that simplify and improve your software release cycle. As a headless content management system (CMS), it manages your content across different channels and platforms. With Contentstack, updates can happen quickly and efficiently. With features like version control and preview options, your developers can work together during planning and development, reducing instances of miscommunication while keeping everyone aligned with your project goals.

Plus, Contentstack’s API-first approach helps you integrate and deploy, allowing for rapid releases that meet user demands. Contentstack is useful in testing because it provides tools to preview content changes before your products go live. Overall, Contentstack speeds your release cycles while maintaining high quality and reliability, giving you an edge over competitors.

Case study: How did Freeletics transform content management and reduce cycle time with Contentstack?

Freeletics faced challenges with its existing CMS, prompting its engineering team to explore new options. They chose Contentstack for its flexibility and essential features. With Raw Engineering's help, they migrated over 6,000 pages in three weeks. As a result, content is now a cross-functional product function. The integration streamlined workflows and translation processes, reducing publication cycle times from 22.5 days to 4.5 days and translation times from four weeks to one week. Also, developer productivity increased by 58% and costs were cut by 60%.

After using Contentstack, Christie L. Cleveland-Callanan, Senior Product Manager at Freeletics, said:

“Contentstack features and flexibility allow us to grow the way we believe we need to grow. Contentstack gives us the freedom to try things we previously hadn’t considered.”

Read the case study here.

FAQs

What is the cycle time of release?

The cycle time of release is the total duration from the start of development to the final deployment of the software. 

What is the release management cycle?

The release management cycle includes software release delivery's planning, development, testing, deployment and maintenance stages.

What is the application release life cycle?

The application release life cycle is the end-to-end process that a software application undergoes from initial development through deployment and ongoing maintenance.

What happens in the release phase?

During the release phase, the software is deployed to production and final checks are conducted to ensure a smooth rollout with minimal disruptions.

Learn more

A stable release cycle is an integral part of your software development life cycle that ensures news features and updates are delivered to your customers on time. A well-managed release cycle also ensures that your products are thoroughly tested, reliable, secure and work as expected. 

When you master high-quality release cycles, you ensure timely delivery of software products and updates that meet customer expectations and drive business growth. If you want to know how Contentstack can streamline your release cycle, talk to us today.