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Release Notifications

When carrying out a release, it is good practice to let stakeholders know the release is about to happen, and what it will mean for them.

What types of work require notification?

Any work that involves a release to a production environment, for any platform. Work includes:

  • Product features and changes
  • Bug fixes that involve code changes
  • Technical improvements and infrastructure changes

How to notify colleagues of a release

  • Release notifications can be carried out by any member of the team that performed the release.
  • Delivery team member posts to the Release Announcements channel in MS Teams (in the Platform Support team) ahead of release.
  • Use tags (groups or individuals) to alert the relevant stakeholders identified in your Release Plan.
  • Send a follow-up message to the same stakeholders to confirm when the release has been completed successfully, or if there’s been an issue and you have to change course/roll back.

What to communicate

When communicating to stakeholders, think about their perspective and what they might need to know. Be sure to:

  • Provide a short summary of the change, including the area of the platform and whether it is part of a larger suite of changes.
  • Provide context behind the change. Stakeholders may not know the change is coming, or why! A brief note on practical applications can be useful.
  • State any visible changes they’ll see as a result, including whether the change has been feature flagged. Even if there are no visible changes, letting stakeholders know that a release is taking place can help manage expectations in the event that there’s an issue.
  • State any actions that are required by users in order to see the desired changes, e.g. clear browser cache, re-promote or re-publish.
  • If this is a bug being fixed, link to the original support ticket affected by the release.

If the release is part of a larger set of changes, the Product Manager should be in discussions with stakeholders throughout development, and will prepare accompanying Feature Notes.

Examples

A good level of detail

Hi [tag(s)] we are about to release the fix for font colours in high contrast mode. This should fix a few instances where font was not sufficiently contrasting when using the high contrast mode toggle. This will require a republish for sites that’s users are using a screen reader.

Poor detail: Valuable information is missing

Hi [tag(s)] [Product Delivery Team] are releasing a change that will improve accessibility when using keyboard focus visibility on video player. This is a visual change and will effect everybody. Will notify when release is complete.

In this scenario, a stakeholder had to ask what the visual change was.

Poor detail: Contextual information is missing

Morning [tag(s)], we are planning to perform an update to the Export Asset Metadata feature today. This will add an Asset ID column to any newly generated asset exports.

In this scenario, a stakeholder had to ask what the Asset ID was/how it was different from other IDs. They benefited from a response that told them the reason for the change, and how it could be applied to their own use cases.