Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29430
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I'm at a different company now than I was when I asked this question, but the new one had the release-notes problem too. Here is how we solved it (at doc's instigation):

- When a bug is filed, if it's customer-reported or customer-facing, the "needs release note" box is checked. (There is a triage team that reviews these and might change this, but this is the starting point.)

- When a developer _fixes_ a bug, if that field is checked he writes a short release note right there in the bug (there's a field for it). Reasoning: he just fixed it; this is the best time to capture what the problem was.

- QA reviews/updates the release note as part of bug verification. (Developers sometimes write "internal" descriptions, such as that the problem was with such-and-such mutex being held too long instead of saying that something froze; the testers know what _symptoms and changes_ they're looking for and can verify, so they can fix some of this.)

- Near the release, people in doc make a pass over all of them to make sure they're coherent English. (There's a report to find all of them; it's the same report that feeds into the final document.)

Obviously if somebody decides late in the process that that bug needs a release note after all, this breaks down. But for the ones we know will (or probably will) need a release note, we try to capture information as early as possible and improve it as we go along. The incremental cost to the developer at the time of fixing the bug is very low, while the cost for anybody trying to figure it out weeks later is much higher.

Original score: 1