Software Release and Integration Verification for the SKA Observatory

The Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) is an international effort to construct word's largest radio telescope in South Africa and Australia, managed as a single observatory from the global headquarters in the UK. SKAO software encompasses the full suite of software products required for telescope operations, developed using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) by over 35 teams across 5 Agile Release Trains. Every 3 months, teams plan and co-ordinate their work to meet observatory milestones through continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI-CD) pipelines. Maintaining high quality software is critical, as released artefacts are verified by Assembly, Integration and Verification (AIV) teams in test facilities before production deployment. A structured release process, enables continuous delivery of new features. Releases follow semantic versioning and are managed through a dedicated jira-based release project, capturing detailed changelog, documentation and stakeholder-relevant metadata. All releases undergo verification in a cloud-based integration environment using simulators and automated tests. This enables early detection of issues, establishes known working baselines, and supports rollback. This paper outlines how SKAO's release management framework support the coordinated delivery of the complex software system, and how integration verification improves the quality, reliability, and traceability of releases delivered to AIV and other stakeholders.