What is Software Release Management? Is it an art or a science? Or, is it just something you do - neither an art nor a science? I believe that it is an art as well as a science.
First the science:
Release Management can be described as the science of combining various parts of a system into one. Understanding how they fall together and then creating a single release working with the project/development teams. One can use a tool (recommended) or build scripts themselves to pick up the various pieces from wherever they are located to move them into the next stage environment. It could be as easy as copying and pasting individual files or creating a zip file, deploying the zip file and unzipping. It could be a 'clean deploy', a 'overwrite deploy', 'update deploy' etc etc.
Now the art part of it:
Release management is also the art of coordinating the various teams so that the resources are available, multiple teams deploying code are not stepping on each others toes, the end-user is aware and ready to accept the new files, the environment is ready to handle the deployment, managing expectations, planning for combining multiple teams' code early if they are touching the same code base, segregating the change types etc etc. This involves people an hence in my opinion is also an art.
This is just the start of it.
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