Releasing on demand

Release on demand is proposed by SAFe to decouple deployment from the actual release of software to customers. Continuous deployment pushes the software into production without making it widely available to customers for regular use. The time between deployment and release is the window of safety to ensure customers get stable features from the moment it is released.

In most cases, the time of release, what to release, and whom to release to are business decisions based on market events and milestones. Delineating deployment from release elevates the business confidence to go to market with release announcements as the features are already available and are tested in production.

During the window of safety period, the development team and business users test deployed features functionally and non-functionally, release them progressively to a smaller subset of users, collect their feedback, and make necessary refinements before releasing them to broader users...