Improving Release and Patch Management Processes: An Empirical Case Study on Process Challenges

Implementing release management and patch management processes effectively are challenges for both IT companies and IT customer organizations. Patch management is an essential sub process of release management within overall software maintenance. The research problem in this study is what types of challenges are related to release management and patch management processes and how the common pitfalls could be avoided. Data for the case study were collected from an information technology (IT) company and an IT department of IT customer organization, which apply IT Infrastructure Library framework (ITIL). The main contribution of the paper is to describe the real-world challenges regarding the release and patch management processes and present the lessons learned with proposed improvements.