Towards Definitions for Release Engineering and DevOps

Delivering software fast, reliable, and predictable is essential for software development organizations. Yet, they often struggle to implement proper approaches and practices like release engineering and DevOps. One reason is the lack of consistent definitions for both of these terms, making it difficult to grasp the meaning and adding further confusion. To the best of our knowledge, there are no uniform definitions for both terms, and thus, many inadequate or even wrong interpretations exist. Consequently, these terms are often confused, misinterpreted, or used as synonyms. In this paper, we propose definitions for release engineering and DevOps to tell both apart.