Release notes, what for? [closed]

Answer 1

Release notes are also important to your testing organization (if you have one), so that they know what's changed in the release and needs testing.

Answer 2

This really depends on who your application is built for and your organizations goals. However, I tend to believe that release notes need to be a concise listing of important key additions, enhancements, or fixes that are included in the particular release.

Sometimes a simple dump of the bug tracking system information is enough, other times, I find that they need to be refined.

The key is that typically Release Notes are believed to be the "Hey look at what we did" type listing of changes.

Answer 3

Our release notes are human created instead of machine created. The cover three main topics.

1. What is included in the releases (list of files)

2. How to install it

3. What changed since the last version (especially if the changes are not in the manual yet).

items 1 and 2 don't chnage much from version to version, but they need to be reviewed. Item 3 takes the most work.

Answer 4

Release note depend of your organization.

I can talk for my organization. We use release note in PDF format and every time we publish a clickonce or a backend version. We send to office manager the Release note. This is a document used by the top administrator of the business (not only IT). This document is a way for them to know what is going on. What have changed, new features that are now in production, bugs fixed, and other thing that they might want to explain to their user.

This is a document that can be between 3 to 4 pages, describing the job that has been done in this version with brief words.