Why You Should Care About Your Release Notes

When you’re someone like me, who has operated and maintained software for yourself or others, the Release Notes are pretty important. Pure software developers or stakeholders often overlook the importance of this topic, as they simply have to deal with Release Notes when building or generating them. They are often an afterthought and just another box to check on a release procedure list. Here are some reasons why spending some time on your Release Note is worth it.

Transparency

Release notes inform users about what has changed, improved, or been fixed in a new version. Doing that in a clear, consistent, and informative manner will help users understand the value of updates, encourage them to adopt new versions, build trust, and allow them to run your software as securely as possible. Here are questions you can ask yourself when writing a release note.

• What are breaking changes? People understand that you have to break an egg to make an omelet. Make it clear when something doesn’t work like before. Help Engineers with links to tutorials on how to solve these roadblocks.

• What is new that doesn’t break things and just makes my life better? These are subtle updates that won’t block an upgrade or affect processes conceptually. As an engineer operating the software, I don’t have to take care of it immediately. Two examples are subtle updates to existing tools or UI tweaks, and performance improvements.

• What security-related topics are addressed? A list of changes that include security maintenance changes from external third-party dependencies and security issues fixed coming from the software itself.

• What was broken and is now fixed? A List of changes that fix functional bugs.

Highlighting New Features

What is the new, bigger thing? Use your release note to showcase new functionality; it makes it easier for users to discover and adopt it. You can encourage users to provide feedback, fostering a collaborative relationship between developers and users. It can serve marketing purposes and can help attract new users or retain existing ones.

Compliance and Accountability

Release notes can serve as documentation for compliance purposes, showing features, improvements, and fixes that are implemented as required. It also tells something about how serious and trustworthy a project is managed and maintained.

Managing Expectations

When you clearly communicate changes, your release notes can help to set realistic expectations. Engineers operating your software will know what to anticipate, which can help to minimize confusion and disappointment. It will also help them to decide how much time they have to allocate for doing this upgrade. Just remember, for most of these engineers, you are just one of many applications they have to take care of. If you ship a new, bigger thing; a new capability or you deprecate and remove something; imagine what your users need to do. Do they have to learn something new, and how does it impact their processes? Once they do the upgrade, they can’t get around it, and they might get stuck in a situation they can’t get out easily.

So long and let’s build better releases notes with some empathy for your users and the ones operating your software.