Description
I’ll be talking about an area of technical writing that’s not particularly glamorous, and tends not to get much love: the humble release note.
When I joined my current company back in September 2017, I noticed we didn’t have a consistent format for our release notes, and they were often clunky and difficult to understand. And when I did a bit of research to see if there were any generally accepted formats, I was surprised at how little guidance I found.
I realised I had plenty of my own ideas about what made a good release note (from reading and writing many over the years), so I gathered them together and gradually formed them into a style guide. Drawing from this, I’ll talk about:
- making release notes easier to write ‐ and read ‐ by grouping them into categories and then using templates to write them
- how you can improve readability with a few simple style tweaks
- viewing release notes as a ready‐made opportunity to show your users the hard work you’ve put into your product ‐ the bugs you’ve fixed, and the suggestions you’ve listened to