Table of Contents
Overview
Test-Driven Deployment
Change Management
Timing
Staying Up to Date
Related Articles
Overview
All product releases undergo rigorous testing by the Coursedog product and engineering teams (and occasionally by Customer Success team members when customized customer environments and use cases are a consideration).
Test-Driven Deployment
Coursedog practices a two-week agile development process with test-driven deployment (TDD) and monthly releases. Here’s how it works:
Developers build the specification to the test and push changes to a QA system where it is thoroughly tested.
Updates are then moved to a staging environment where they can be tested by active implementations before they are pushed to production.
Once in production, they are gated behind role-based access control and admins can opt in to using the functionality.
When new functionality is deployed, it is captured in our monthly release notes.
Any end user is able to provide feedback through our public Help Center ticket submission if a bug is found.
Change Management
Overview
Planned product releases are made available internally via the planned quarterly roadmap, regular product-update meetings, and monthly product release notes. highlighting the details around upcoming features and functionality.
Via these mechanisms, your Customer Success team is informed of upcoming changes to environments and can proactively discuss any upcoming releases with customers if an impact on their customized environment is suspected or known.
The release can then be planned for or postponed from certain customer environments if necessary.
Process
The change management process includes:
Impact analysis prior to build.
Authorization of all feature/code changes by leadership, product management, engineering leads, and peer review.
Tested in Staging prior to Production release.
The engineering team is the only team authorized to release new code to Production.
Timing
New releases will appear in staging first, and then are generally pushed to production 4+ weeks later.
Major enhancements will be turned on once a month.
Releases typically occur during off-peak hours.
Planned updates typically take place on Friday evenings or during the weekend.
Priority issue releases (e.g. bug fixes and small improvements) are not on a monthly cadence; rather, those will be continuously released.
This does not impact uptime as we are cloud-native.
Staying Up to Date
Release Notes
We issue release notes on a monthly cadence.
You can learn more about release notes here or access them directly here.
Feature Spotlights
Occasionally, the Coursedog team might also choose to highlight certain new and exciting features via "Feature Spotlights'' (focused and detailed overviews of new functionality). These aren’t on a regular cadence and will be shared via email whenever warranted. Be on the look-out!