Releases stuck in 'Rejected' state

Question

I wanted to delete an old release template we used for testing to clean up Release Management a bit. But when I tried to deactivate the template, I got the following message:

To deactivate this release template, any releases that use this template must have one of the following statuses: Released, Abandoned

Alright, that message makes sense... there must be a few unfinished releases that I need to finish, either by completing the process or abandoning it. When I went to the list of pending releases though, there are a bunch of them in the Rejected state that I can neither retry nor abandon. For example:

Now I can't delete the old, obsolete template, because I can't find a way to abandon these rejected releases. What should I do to delete the template?

Answer 1

Make sure you are or are in the group that is responsible for the Validation of the stage.

I had a similar issue even though I am a Release Manager, but when I made myself the Validator of the stage that it failed/rejected on, it allowed me to access the Retry/Restart/Abandon buttons for the rejected releases.

Configure Paths / Release Paths / [Path name]:

This can get out of sync if you have a domain username change like I did. It hadn't propagated all the way through our system yet, so the Release Administration group didn't include my new guid. So I assigned my new User to the Validator role and the buttons appeared on the Release window.