Understanding The Impact Of Changes, Updates and Releases

Successful release projects involve a great of support, investment, collaboration and dedication. Whether your goal is to improve what you have, or deliver something entirely new, robust, reliable, comparative performance and impact data from the first few hours after deployment is crucial. The possibility of losing business or damaging brand due to errors caused by updates, changes and new releases is a real concern for organisations whose website is an integral part of the business.

Release management is a relatively new but rapidly growing discipline within software engineering, especially as systems become more complex, specialised and interdependent.

Whether your organisation operates on the principle of infrequent large releases, or frequent small releases, the importance of tracking the impact of any sort of change cannot be underestimated. Anything that affects user behaviour (whether that is a network, hardware, software, content or design issue) will be felt directly on both brand and the bottom line.

Releasing The Pressure

Software development, whether for business applications or internal IT services, is often never truly “finished” and products and applications are in a constant cycle of development, testing, and release. Agile development methodologies and the “permanent beta” approach have put greater pressure on the release management team and increased the need for reliable comparison data.

This process of continual updating and refinement applies not only to the individual development pieces but to the evolution platforms it runs on and the advances in hardware and infrastructure that contain and underlie it. There are a lot of moving pieces involved in even the simplest IT project that must fit together seamlessly to guarantee success and long-term value.

The Site Release Monitor report compares user journey performance in terms of delivery, availability and value of lost sales/opportunities at regular, user specified intervals, following a tracked change to the site, for example an upgrade, development or any other alteration, at regular, specified intervals with the same period the previous week.

Where an issue occurs this complexity caused by multiple variables can make isolating the cause extremely time consuming. With many departments now waiting on the results of a change, and needing different data comparisons, the need to easily and automatically get the right information to the right people at the right time is becoming more and more crucial.

The SV-Release Monitor reporting provides you not only with technical and operational information,but shows the impact of changes in performance on opportunity cost, the value of lost sales, the potential of lost leads, perception of customer service, user experience and brand management across all media.

Create, Compare, Communicate

Reports are automatically generated and emailed directly to all stakeholders specified by the administrator, enabling immediate information sharing throughout the organization, reducing waiting time and allowing for instant response and action where necessary.

A new report is generated by default at a user configurarable schedule after a tracked release:

To enable rapid assessment of the impact of the release each comparison table compares performance at 3 points in the critical hours after release.

1. The time at which the report is generated.
2. The equivalent period immediately prior to release.
3. The equivalent period a week prior to release.

Performance is compared in terms of percentage change from the comparison periods, complemented by an intuitive graphical display that offers “understanding at a glance” with a red bar indicating a decline in performance and a green bar an improvement.

As with all SV-Monitor services the SV-Site Release Management includes the ability to add annotations against any errors or slowdowns for future documentation, analysis and review, and the ability to cross post information with your trouble-ticket system.

The Site Release Monitor Performance Comparison report compares site performance at regular, specified intervals following an upgrade, development or any other alteration with the same period the previous week.

SV Monitoring Suite

All products in the Monitoring Suite have been designed with different user needs in mind, but alll are
delivered through the intuitive Customer Portal, and enjoy the one-on-one managed service support, that our clients value so highly.

To help support all teams, and provide a “single point of truth”, all products in the SV Monitor Suite are designed to ensure that everyone can understand and be proficient in using the wide ranging metrics to deliver ongoing improvements.

The importance of SV-Monitoring Suite reporitng is that it provides information that is accessible and actionable across all teams within an eCommerce organisation.

Supporting the Release Manager

The SV-Site Release Management tool provides information that supports supports the release manager by:

• Support interdepartmental collaboration on development and design
• enabling relevant staff and departments to take responsibility for their changes
• helping support review and analysis towards continual process improvement and ROI
• helping to identify and trouble shoot problems
• Planning support and managing 3rd parties and partners.
• co-ordination of changes in line with business considerations
• Providing a common language and a single point of truth for discussion and documentation
• helping to establish a robust release cycle.

For more information about setting up your user journeys please read our User Journey FAQ

Request Demonstration

View our client testimonials If you would like one of our service professionals to contact you to arrange a demonstration of our web testing services or discuss your web site performance goals/needs free of charge please contact us. To contact a service professional call us on +44 (0) 1227 768276 or request a telephone/email call back