IT audit and information system security services identify and analyze potential risks and their mitigation or removal to maintain the functioning of the information system and the organization's overall business (Deloitte, n.d.). IS Auditing includes evaluating all IT assets in an organization and checking if they align with the organization's strategy, mission, and vision.
In today's world, where IT Systems support organizations to reach their goals, it is prevalent for organizations to have a continuous plan for constant improvement of their processes and applications, given the competition. A technique for getting a product out to users is called software release management. Planning, software creation, testing, and deployment occur before the software becomes functional (Saddam, 2022). The process of ensuring that software releases can be successfully planned, scheduled, and delivered to live environments is called release management. The release management process involves a great deal of automated computer system configuration and collaboration. Therefore, consider all release elements before deploying them to the live environment to create a new release and investigate potential concerns (Amir et al., 2013). Release management also aims at making the user experience as smooth and efficient as possible.
While deploying releases, the release and deployment management process aims to provide services and protect the integrity of the organization's IT production environment (Rana, 2005). Release and deployment management's primary goal is to establish practical service usage and deploy successful releases into production to add value for users or customers. However, there are numerous instances of low-quality releases that come at a high cost to the company because of the complexity of application tiers and infrastructure environments growing, the volume and frequency of application releases increasing, the lack of control over the release processes, the DevOps disconnect between teams, manual deployments, etc. (Shanmugasundaram & Sarojini, 2018). Any software business can suffer significantly from an ineffective release management strategy since it results in a lack of control over the delivered changes and their quality. Therefore, having a well-considered end-to-end release management process has many benefits (Kajko-Mattsson, 2005). An application release also targets upgrading a current application, aiming to make it faster, with better user-friendly features and aesthetics.
The Agile Release Train (ART) is a long-lived team of Agile teams, which, along with other stakeholders, incrementally develops, delivers, and, where applicable, operates one or more solutions in a value stream (Knaster, 2021). Many organizations must realize that when releases are inadequately planned, they can sometimes lead to many disasters. It may result in a loss for the organization instead of improving its business. It is simple to get stuck in a cycle of dysfunctional releases, release procedures marked by inefficiency, delays, and never-ending meetings that lead people to see releases as a problem. Project management and release planning are crucial aspects for this reason. This paper addresses all the gaps in release management and planning, the consequences an organization may face from poor release management, and how auditors can follow effective practices and guidelines to foresee and mitigate risks.
In later sections, we go into greater detail about the risks associated with agile release management, which eventually directed us to create a control activities lifecycle that incorporates controls at every phase of the development process to guarantee smooth releases of products for users.
The traditional waterfall methodology, which most enterprises had previously adopted, is covered in section 1, along with the reasons why organizations began to switch to agile methods, which gave rise to agile release management, allowing businesses to update their products to stay on par or one step ahead of the competition. Section 1 also introduces the research model in the chapter, centered around significant risks. The discussion of recent research and reviews of earlier publications on agile release management is covered in Section 2. The fundamentals of agile project and release management, the purpose and significance of back-to-back releases, and the risks introduced to the production environment due to inadequate release management are covered in Section 3. By introducing control activities at each level of the release management lifecycle, Section 4 shows why auditing an agile development lifecycle is crucial for seamless releases and how it can help the firm accomplish its strategic goals. The cybersecurity controls that can be incorporated into the software development lifecycle for streamlined and safe releases are finally listed in section 5, effectively reducing the risks to which the product would be vulnerable.
Now, let us understand the traditional waterfall model and compare it with the agile methodology to understand the significant inclination towards agile in release management.