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).
Deployment Cycle
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From a customer perspective, urgent fixes are released continuously, whereas planned, non-urgent fixes are released on a monthly cadence (and generally timed to appear soon after Monthly Release Notes are received).
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But behind the scenes, code is continuously deployed to our testing and Staging environments.
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However, the planned features in that deployment will not yet appear to customers as they will be hidden behind a “Feature Flag” until they are ready.
Change Management
Overview
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Planned product updates will be shared via Monthly Release Notes.
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Many planned releases will also have in-app messaging (e.g. beacons or popups) highlighting the new feature.
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If an upcoming feature will require schools to take urgent action, admins will receive additional communication.
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We also have internal meetings to review product releases. During these meetings, your Customer Success team is informed of upcoming changes.
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Releases can be planned for or postponed from certain customer environments if necessary.
Process
The change management process includes:
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Impact analysis prior to build.
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Authorization of all feature/code changes by leadership, product management, engineering leads, and peer review.
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Testing in Staging prior to Production release.
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The engineering team is the only team authorized to release new code to Production.
Timing
Updates Captured in Release Notes
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Planned, non-urgent fixes appear to customers on a monthly cadence, timed with our release notes.
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New, planned releases will appear in Staging first, and then will generally (but not always) appear in Production 4+ weeks later.
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We sometimes follow a “Gradual Release” rollout for updates.
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Gradual Releases progressively roll out changes while actively monitoring key metrics and can roll back automatically if problems are detected.
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That means you might not see something in your UI as soon as it’s in release notes; rather, it might be a few hours or even a couple days before it appears to you.
Priority Fixes
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Things like bug fixes and small improvements are not on a monthly cadence; rather, those will be continuously released into Staging and biweekly into Production (though urgent fixes can be released as soon as they’re available).
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Those biweekly Production updates typically take place on Friday evenings or during the off-peak hours on the weekend.
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This does not impact uptime as we use rolling blue-green deployments that allow us to update our application with zero downtime (exception being recurring infrastructure maintenance, which occurs Sundays from 1-5 a.m., ET).
Staying Up to Date
Release Notes
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!
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