Do you know of any agile process that is created for code releases? One of the main theme of agile is frequent releases and each company/client would have their own test/approval processes that control code releases. Most of the time these slow down the pace of “frequent releases”
Currently we have a proprietary tool based workflow. The team who needs a code promotion needs to create a promotion request to one of the final UAT servers. Once this is complete, and once tests are done, certain customers, technical/non-technical managers need to approve, then it goes in to production deploy stage. Meanwhile no sprint planning meeting or anything of that sort.
What is the code release process (Which is agile) that has worked for you?
Why is there no sprint planning meeting of any sort while the workflow proceeds? Tag your repository and get on with the next release straight away. If you need bug fixes on the candidate release, branch from the tag and fix them. The approvals workflow and final UAT testing should not either involve or delay the development team. (Excuse non-distributed SCM terminology if you are actually on something like Git or Mercurial.)
If you take an Agile process like Scrum, the release output is “releasable software” not “released software”. If you have an overhead getting stuff released to production, then it can just happen in parallel. I should add that the majority of the testing should have been as part of the sprint – perhaps you need to revisit exactly what testing is done when in your cycle?