‘Great things come in small packages’ said Aesop once upon a time. As this is true for most great things in life, it is also true of Release Notes of software. At a glance, Release Notes may not seem much at all, but they are far more important than the credit given to them. But how and why? There are many reasons. Let’s explore some of them together.
Keep customers, vendors, and users in the loop.
As your software develops and evolves, you need to inform the world of the valuable updates and changes you have made to it. Whether it be simple bug fixes or more complex changes such as new features, display your talents. Send links to your release notes in your marketing emails. Place links to your release notes from your website pages.
Show your users and customers that you are listening to them – this shows they are important to your company, which in turn makes them feel appreciated.
Everybody knows that customers are important for any business. Release Notes show your users/customers that you are constantly working to evolve your software. It shows you are actively listening to the feedback you receive to meet demands.
New features / updates/ changes show that you are constantly working to improve and stay up to date.
Agility means the ability to think quickly in an intelligent way. What better way to show your company’s agility than to show the world your constant improvements and new features to adapt and keep up with the ever-changing IT environment. This is exactly what Release Notes are – they show that you are ready and able to change and evolve.
Release notes are your products history to date.
Your cyber baby is growing with nurture each day. Flaunt to the world how you have come from zero to hero.
Customers point of view: Great to see how all the tweaks and adjustments that have led to the empire that your favorite program has become?
Since it is your customers who use your program, it’s only natural that they ask for the changes and adjustments to it. And in turn, they enjoy seeing their change requests come to life.
Keep in mind that your users are not developers.
Write your release notes in a way that is clear, concise, and easily understandable by everyone. You can leave the techno lingo in the office. Write in a human-human tone.
To conclude, we can see that release notes are of great significance to software development. Release notes are a multi-faceted tool used across marketing, support, sales, and the team internally. Release notes may seem like the small package of the software world, but as we have seen, great things come from it.
Check out our Release notes at CloudOffix.