cloud release notes process

[Sharon Metzger]

Hi folks -- I like how the new Confluence cloud release notes blog works -- wrapping up the weekly changes into a post. Question -- there's aren't obvious links to JIRA like there is with Confluence server release notes. I'd love some clues/best practices as to how the cloud release notes get populated -- IOW, is there a JIRA query behind the scenes, or some other way that the release notes blogger gets the weekly content?

[Giles B · Accepted solution]

Hi Sharon, thanks for taking an interest in our new release notes.

There's a Jira issue in the background for each feature/change, which tracks progress (is this released to users?) and provides the content for the release notes. Everything released in the last week is scooped up for inclusion in the release notes. These issues, though, often don't tie directly to a particular feature request or bug fix with a public-facing jira.atlassian.com issue.

Where a feature/change does tie directly to an issue that adds context, we're encouraging writers to link to that issue. Otherwise we can link to any web resource, whether it's existing documentation, a separate blog post (especially for bigger changes), or any other web page that provides more information if it's needed.

We're still working on how we write for this style of release notes, including making best use of links to other content. If you think anything doesn't have enough context, let us know with a question like this one and we'll see how we can improve :)

[Mike Howells · Accepted solution]

Hi Sharon, in case you're interested in some of the nitty gritty...

We are adopting continuous deployment for our Cloud products, which means we push code into production as frequent small changes and use feature flags to control when users get to see new things. We needed to find a way to track the delivery of features independently from the deployment of releases, as the latter are now small and automated with all non-trivial changes hidden. 

We use a custom Jira integration to keep track of feature delivery based on the state of feature flags, so we have a ticket that shows where we're up to with each feature. Those Jira tickets help product/platform teams collaborate effectively on each new feature, and include a summary of the impact on users in a "What's New" field.

Once a week we generate a blog post from the "What's New" content provided by each team in their feature delivery tickets. This gives us a kind of continuous release notes to go with our continuous deployment.

[Sharon Metzger]

Thanks Giles and Mike -- good input here that I can share with my team. We've released a cloud-native product and are figuring out the details of what continuous deployment looks like for our team, so this is definitely helpful.

Thanks!