What exactly happens when you close a release?

[Yvonne Henderson]

We recently started using JIRA for our scrum dev practice. We aim to push the work we developed each sprint to production on a biweekly cadence. Occasionally however, we will not release to production and instead wait until we have a few sprints' worth of work and then deploy. This can mean that we have as many as three sprints going to production at one time. 

In order to track when these multiple sprints went out the door, we have been utilizing the Releases module in our JIRA project. This way we can map each Release/Fix Version on a certain bug/story and utilize the Release reports for tracking purposes. When we actually push to production we will be able to identify exactly what tickets were included in that release. 

My question relates to what exactly happens what I hit release. We do not integrate with Bamboo, as our only integration is with Github. We are just using the Release function as a grouping mechanism. I've seen in another article that hitting "release" does not change the status of any tickets in any way. My hope is that when I hit Release, it literally just closes that release and doesn't alter or change anything else in any way.

In summary, just confirming that, in my setup, hitting Release won't have any foreseen consequences apart from marking that release as "Released". Thanks in advance for any help!

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

@Yvonne Henderson, welcome to the Community. You are correct that releasing doesn’t change the status. The only thing that really happens is to list all “done” issues under the Fix Version in question and sets the release date. Now with that said I’m unclear why you would release issues if they actually aren’t moved to production. I typically don’t release until I’m ready to go to production regardless of how many sprints are involved. The reason I take this approach is that I don’t want to burn a release number. Of course that is just a personal choice.

[Yvonne Henderson]

Hi Jack! Thank you for your response! That is exactly the answer I needed.

I completely agree with your statement and perhaps should've clarified further. We do intend to only mark a release (and all accompanying issues) as done once we have actually pushed it to production. It was more of a query around ensuring that I don't hit any unforeseen consequences or additional features/dependencies that I was unaware of.

Thank you again for your assistance!

[aliakseipashkel]

@Yvonne Henderson, hitting Release creates a version you're releasing. This doesn't necessarily mean it's released to Production in my experience. This version can be released for internal review, for example. Once you're ready to release to Production, you can go to Releases and Merge (top right-hand corner) versions into one single Release to Production.