XL release coordinates multi-group release actions
Rating: 10 out of 10
November 28, 2017
KD
Vetted Review
Verified User
2 years of experience
XL is being used by multiple groups in my consulting software development organizations where a release control framework is needed. The main purpose is to allow the fine control of timing between both manual and automatic release activities. The tool acts as a workflow manager for the marketing, documentation, project management, and deployment scripts that combine to release a new major version. We use it sometimes for minor releases but only if there is cross-team coordination.
- Cross-team release workflow control using email, texts, scripts allow our release management to be truly a 360 process.
- XL Release allowing our Jenkins toolchain to control the beginning of release trains which is very powerful.
- XL release allows us to expose the business process flow for anyone to read direct at the source which runs the process instead of a separate vision.
Cons
- XL release is really only missing a consolidated calendar view where you can see the planned activity for the next month, it only knows about what is in progress.
- XL release has improved our consistency of release process, removing multiple days worth of manual status checking and coordination.
- XL release has allowed us to increase the number of beta releases we can support due to simplifying our release actions.
XL release is simpler to configure and deploy to the organization than other change management platforms I have used. That simplicity has minor drawbacks requiring you to fit into a limited set of control methods but that exercise helped us simplify a needlessly onerous process.