New Year, New Release Process

One of our top priorities of 2024 (a resolution - if you will) is to increase the velocity at which we deliver innovative features while also maintaining the integrity and performance of our platform. Doing so is critical in order to facilitate the rapid care modeling cycles of our customers. With that in mind, we are excited to share an important update regarding how we release feature updates and fixes. 

Get notified of product updates using our release note RSS feed

Release Cadence

We are shifting away from our Wednesday evening releases to a more agile approach. We will be releasing features and fixes as soon as they are ready, departing from the fixed weekly schedule. Releases will now occur multiple times per week, at all hours of the day, specific to a feature, fix, or necessary update. 

This change to smaller, more frequent updates has several key advantages:

1. Narrower and Deeper  Testing: The smaller update size allows us to focus more deeply on testing changes in each release. Test plans will be developed based on the changes being introduced. This targeted approach helps ensure we find issues prior to a feature or fix being released. It also makes it easier for us to detect and address any issues promptly if they do make it into production as the change set for investigation is smaller.
2. Managing Changes to Your Workflow: Updates that may significantly affect your workflow will be released behind flags. This means they won’t immediately impact your experience. Instead, they may be made available for early adoption by those interested. We will communicate clear timelines for when these flags will be removed, making the feature available to everyone.This will allow us to deploy code changes during business hours without disrupting end users. 
3. Early Access and Feedback: Early adopters will have the opportunity to opt into beta programs. By doing so, you can gain early access to these new features, providing us with valuable feedback before the wider release. Your input during this phase will be crucial in improving usability and functionality of these updates. Each beta program will have an overview page that will state whether we are looking for additional participants and instructions on how to indicate interest.

Release Communication

We added a new space to the docs site for product updates. We will post updates as they happen to the release notes feed. We’ve added tags for easy filtering, so that you can focus on the most relevant changes (api, sdk, ui, etc.). The `beta` tag will be used to flag items that have been released behind flags and only available to beta participants. 

The upcoming changes page is meant to provide advance notice on anticipated changes that may impact your workflow, or require development. Features that are released behind flags will also be listed with their associate roll-out dates. 

We will continue to add to this space, with plans to include a workflow to communicate breaking changes and the documentation pages for features currently in beta. 

You can currently subscribe to the release notes using the RSS feed. This can be integrated into Slack, or you can use a service like Feedrabbit to have the updates delivered to your inbox. 

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These changes will not only improve the reliability of our updates but also increase the speed of enhancements. Thanks for being with us on this journey!

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