Product Release Engineering: What’s in the name?
There are many names and descriptions to the organizations and teams companies use to improve software development speed and stability:
- Productivity Engineering
- Engineering Productivity
- Developer Productivity
- Engineering Velocity
- Release Engineering
- Developer Acceleration
- Developer Systems
- Developer Experience
- Developer Platform
- Engineering Excellence
These types of organizations can range in size, housing many domains such as developer tools, build infrastructure, mobile infrastructure, cloud engineering, platform engineering, internal tools and developer happiness. And usually there is a team dedicated to each domain.
But why, for example, developer happiness? In other words what is the true intent or mandate of organizations like the ones listed above? What comes to my mind when trying to maintain and improve a product’s stability and delivery speed to market, is not developer happiness. What comes to mind is the original intent of enabling product teams (also known as mission teams or squads) to quickly deliver a high quality software product to customers.
Speed is essential because there is an opportunity cost associated with not delivering software -Dave Farley & Jez Humble
At the end of the day the focus is on the product. And delivering great digital experiences cannot happen without first class continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). How else are we going to match business demands!
So whatever we choose to call ourselves — Developer Acceleration, Developer Productivity — or my personal favourite — Product Release Engineering, the products and services we must offer the business are:
- Consultation on best practices for software release
- Proof of concepts, demos, training and documentation
- Custom CI/CD pipeline design
- Managing build infrastructure
- Measuring workflow through the pipeline
- Building software tools and applications, like configuration management micro-services to aid in testing a mobile application against different backends, or bash scripts to help connect CI platforms, or Fastlane plugins to increase pipeline features, to name a few.
Product teams and the overall business are trusting us to deliver these products and services consistently, and to continue to explore better ways of releasing software products.
