Why Include Advance Release Notices?

Informing team members or customers of upcoming changes helps to reduce the number of changes that result in your solution operating worse. Having a lower percentage of change failures helps to improve the stability of your team's platform, and builds the confidence needed to enable deploying changes multiple times a week.

Reduce Complications from Increased Deployment Frequencies

As your team increases its deployment rate, it puts a heavier demand on communication between teams that had previously used multiple meetings a week to get aligned on what was coming out in the subsystems of the product. Initial symptoms of this occurring are increasing system integration bugs, increasing frustration due to miscommunications relating to changes, or spikes of effort aggregated around releases.

Automate Synchronization with Development Teams

Integrating advance release notifications allows for teams to reduce the pressure of reoccurring meetings and transition to a process of optional ad-hoc inquiries based on the identified changes. They provide other developers with the features and bug fixes coming up in a release, as well as links to the code associated with those changes.

Reduce time to alignment with other teams

In addition to aligning engineers, advance release notices can be tailored per stakeholder so that other teams can get a heads up on what they need to be preparing.

• Quality Assurance: Identify what functions that are impacted by the change and should have smoke tests run by the quality assurance team.
• Sales: Indicate bug fixes and features will be available so that they can provide feedback, learn, and integrate them into upcoming customer engagements.
• Marketing: Outline enhancements and resolutions so that they can prepare announcements, promotions, and relevant outreach.

Increase Transparency and Traceability

By distributing notifications to everyone a release impacts, before deploying it, informs everyone on the team of what has changed and allows them to prepare. This data breaks down silos of information and creates a log for when there are questions about what was impacted in past releases, enabling teams to optimize their operations further.