At Kanoppi, we like to release often, and plan to release every four weeks. As we sometimes get questions about our release cycle, we’d like to tell you more.
Kanoppi: four-week releases
At Kanoppi, we use continuous delivery so our engineering team create and release our plugin and software in short cycles.
If we have a bug, we can fix and release the fix quickly because our developers know exactly what they have worked on in the past four weeks and if a bug is introduced they only have to debug four week’s worth of code, instead of many months.
Release focus
We plan in advance what our developers are going to work on and this means they can concentrate on one feature at a time
Better collaboration
At Kanoppi, collaboration is vital as we are currently a small team. With a monthly release cycle our developers can discuss important features or issues with our support team and also our content and marketing team.
So, when we have a new feature or change we can prepare our help documents and plan in advance how we explain this to our users.
We test our code
We have a separate testing process for our plugin.
1. Automated testing
Every night the plugin with the latest development changes is tested against automated tests. The results of these tests are processed for the developers to highlight if new code affects existing functionality. All new features receive automated tests before these features are released.
2. Pre-production testing
Every release candidate gets tested on several testing environments. This includes our own kanoppi.co website. We will not make our code live if it breaks kanoppi.co so we test this very carefully.
3. Acceptance testing
Another part of testing is the so-called acceptance phase. All release candidates are tested. The testers test based on user experience, they test our software on various browsers and operating systems.
4. Feedback processing phase
If a user comes across an issue after a new release, we analyse this carefully.
We first check if this is a breaking change and how this can be fixed as soon as possible. Then we check if we need to add add any additional tests to our testing plan.