Release management in large-scale software development projects requires significant communication and coordination.
Five of them are directly related to release management activities: Request for comments.
This paper aims to further the understanding of communication and coordination in a software ecosystem with respect to release management.
Five out of nine discussion categories in a general GNOME development mailing list were in related to release management and showed temporal synchronization with the development cycle schedule.
Considering the prominence of the release team mailing list in the social network, the overall coverage of the release team members in the discussions (Fig. 7), and the proportion of discussions related to release management, we can infer that desktop-devel-list is relevant for the release management process.
InCycle is a Canadian company that specializes in application lifecycle management (ALM) and release management solutions on Microsoft's.NET platform.
The release team uses an internal mailing list (release-team) to discuss and decide issues directly related to release management, and a global one (desktop-devel-list) for the whole ecosystem.
We identified the Desktop Development mailing list [75] as the main channel for information related to release management: it is where the discussion of the desktop and platform development takes place.
The CSA guidance is made up of 99 control specifications covering such area as: Compliance, Governance, Facility, human resource and Information security, Legal matters, Operations, Risk and Release management, Resiliency and the security architecture.
Release management in such an ecosystem relates to both technical and social aspects of software engineering [15, 59] in a highly distributed setting [27, 30] and better understanding of this phenomenon is important both for closed and open source development.
