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Release Engineering: From Structural to Functional View

With an increasing demand to speed up and to improve software delivery, the release engineer (RE) role has drawn a lot of attention from both academia and industry. However, this growth of interest is hampered by: (1) the dilema of enabling both fast delivery of features (Dev team) and fast delivery of value (RE); (2) disagreements about how release practices should be organized and automatized; (3) a confusion over the scope of software release activities and terminology. Based on empirical data related to technical and social interactions of a release engineering (RE) team with other roles such as Developer, Business Analyst and Tester, we first analyse these integrations and build multiple tasks-interaction graphs which leads to more accurate taxonomical view of RE activities (the structural view). A proposed conceptual framework has been developed both to support the adoption of RE role, and to organize concerns for future research. Then, we overlap interactions' graphs to uncover more attributes of the RE role (the functional view). We discover that a release engineer plays a central role linking four different communities (Devs, BAs, Testers, and DBAs) with a very high closeness value, but low betweeness value.