In this article, we explore recent trends in accelerating software development and how they apply to organizations of various sizes. We also examine the specific requirements enterprises place on the release management process, and how Continuous Delivery can be adapted to meet these demands. Additionally, we outline a practical solution tailored to the realities of enterprise environments, along with the benefits it offers to development teams and organizations. Finally, we briefly touch on how this approach can be implemented using Atlassian Jira.

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Acceleration, acceleration, acceleration...

Through our engagements, we speak with global engineering leaders almost daily, and we’re seeing a growing emphasis on acceleration and achieving faster time-to-market goals. This shift is driving an increase in both the number and frequency of releases. Fortunately, modern software architectures—truly decoupled and distributed—are well-suited to meet this demand, providing engineering teams with a solid foundation for rapid delivery.

Agile and DevOps practices are becoming the de facto standard, empowering teams and organizations to deliver more effectively. While the maturity of these practices varies across organizations, the foundational capabilities are generally robust enough to support consistent execution.

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Why is Enterprise a different beast?

Continuous Delivery is a promising approach for reducing time to market and responding more quickly to changing market needs, without compromising product quality. It works well in less complex architectural landscapes, which are more common among small and medium-sized businesses. However, it poses certain challenges for enterprises, where value is typically delivered at the solution level and involves multiple interconnected products. These implicit or explicit dependencies require careful management, often necessitating additional layers of integration and testing of non-functional requirements such as performance and security.

In addition, enterprises are more frequently subject to regulatory requirements, which call for compliance checks and a more formal change management process.

As a result, while Continuous Delivery is highly effective for enabling early integration and faster deployments to lower environments, a more gated approach—with clearly defined quality gates—is often necessary when promoting changes to higher environments.

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Solution: Level up!

Executing quality gates at the level of each individual work item (such as a task, story, or bug), as is common in the Continuous Delivery philosophy, is becoming increasingly impractical and overwhelming. A more effective approach is to elevate the process and perform quality checks at the artifact level—that is, on specific versions of software components or products that make up a solution. By establishing a standardized, company-wide approach, organizations can streamline the promotion of these artifacts to higher environments.

As a result, the definition of a "solution" evolves into a collection of interconnected artifacts (product releases) — each aggregating multiple work items — with quality gates applied at the artifact or solution level. This shift reflects how business value is typically delivered: not through individual work items, but through coordinated releases of multiple components working together.

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Important benefits

Artifact-based release management offers several additional benefits. Notably, it enables a clear separation between tactical and strategic levels within the enterprise. This approach provides software development teams with the freedom and flexibility to use various techniques and methodologies for building components or products, while establishing a common framework at both the product release and solution levels. In turn, this allows for a unified and orchestrated release process that aligns with the goals and objectives defined at the solution level.

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How can Release Management Apps for Jira help?

In Atlassian Jira, Releases (also known as Versions) are tied to specific Jira projects, which limits visibility and orchestration in enterprise use cases, especially those that span multiple projects. The simplistic status model and limited taxonomy further hinder efforts to structure enterprise-level release management processes effectively.

Release Management for Jira addresses these challenges by offering cross-project release management capabilities, robust workflows, automation, and a more comprehensive taxonomy. This enables organizations to establish a unified release management process at the artifact level and to package these artifacts into business solutions with their own dedicated workflows.

Enterprises can also benefit from complementary features such as structured release roadmaps with intermediate milestones, externally shareable release calendars, multiple automated release note templates, and more.

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Take out

As global engineering leaders aim for faster time-to-market, modern decoupled architectures and Agile/DevOps practices are helping teams accelerate delivery. However, large enterprises face unique challenges due to complex solution-level dependencies, regulatory requirements, and the need for rigorous integration and non-functional testing.

While out-of-the-box Continuous Delivery techniques work well for smaller, simpler systems, enterprises often need a more structured and gated release process, particularly in higher environments.

To address this, organizations can adopt artifact-based release management, shifting quality gates from individual work items to artifacts (i.e., versions of components/products). This enables better orchestration, scalability, and alignment with business value, as solutions are formed by multiple interconnected artifacts.

Artifact-based release management also balances team autonomy and strategic governance, allowing flexibility in development practices while unifying release processes across the organization.

Release Management for Jira supports this approach by overcoming native Jira limitations through cross-project capabilities, release-centric roadmaps and calendars, advanced workflows, automation, and comprehensive release notes. This helps enterprises standardize and scale release management across their solutions.