We share our experience on how we collect release reports - quickly, correctly and without manual labor.
We at True Engineering started to automate the preparation of Release Notes a few years ago . Our goal was to bring them to a single standard for all teams, to save team leads and PMs from manual work on preparing materials, to insure against possible mistakes that necessarily arise if something is done manually.
We have made a web constructor on our internal portal, which allows you to assemble a ready-made release report in a few clicks. The service is integrated with task trackers, from where it automatically pulls up all information on the release. At the exit, the application generates a layout e-mail report for the customer. All information is divided into categories, each item has a link to the corresponding page in the tracker.
Why changes were needed
For several years the instrument worked in this form, but progress does not stand still. When we started implementing Trunk Based Development (TBD), the approach to Release Notes also had to change.
The TBD concept assumes that development is ongoing, and the team is constantly releasing updates with micro-releases. This speeds up product development, shortens the Time-to-Market (time from the start of development to the delivery of the product to users), and provides developers with prompt feedback from the customer and users.
Another factor is that in recent years, most of our products have moved to microservices. This architecture assumes that teams use multiple repositories for each participating microservice. The release of one feature includes several releases for different microservices, and this is quite difficult to track.
New mechanics
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The beauty is that it will be very easy to scale this experience - just a letter to technical support, which will indicate the tag that the Aggregator should catch, and the list of addresses where the Release Notes should be sent.