To ensure proper auditing, enforce proper security, and positively influence quality, Notion Solutions uses industry best practices to facilitate the promotion and release of your software. All source code, documents, designs, and other artifacts are stored and maintained in Team Foundation Server version control. A complete history from the inception of the software to its release is captured, and links to the requirements, work assignments, and other work items is effectively maintained. A snapshot in time can be easily recreated and reported.

Adherence to release management best practices not only ensures that client audit and security needs are being met, but also means that engineers spend their time solving problems instead of coping with the complexity of typical software configuration management challenges. A key component of Notion's release management strategy is build. Builds common on a typical Notion-developed project include:

• Continuous Integration Build – Each time a developer commits changes to the source control repository, a build is launched that compiles, tests, and configures the project being developed.  Problems, and their cause, is identified by the automated build process and reported to the team immediately.
• Daily Build – Notion Solutions runs a daily build that may include a more comprehensive test suite than the continuous integration build process.This daily build helps the team track overall project quality as the project matures.
• QA Promotion Build – During an automated promotion to QA, binaries are compiled, installers are created, and all appropriate test environments are deployed and configured in the test environment. The quality assurance runs this build as their schedule allows, relieving the development team of the burden of deploying updates to the test team.
• Production Build – Production deployment is fully automated and secured to ensure that the production build is predictable, painless, and efficient.  Smoke tests verify the integrity of the production environment to ensure that teams are able to deploy as often as necessary (as approved) with minimal effort.

The following video provides a brief look at the Notion release management process: