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Types of Engineering Services Change Communication

Goals and Success Criteria

The primary goal is to communicate updates, new features, and anything of note that is changing. Success looks like:

  • No surprises
  • New value is known
  • Breaking changes are expected, and proper runway is given to mitigate
  • All changes (big or small) available to help with transparency that enables easy diagnosability

Areas to Communicate Changes

There are several areas around which communication will occur. The nature of these updates remain the same for each of these areas.

  • DNCeng Services (Helix, Darc, etc)
  • Shared Tools (Arcade SDK, Signing, etc)
  • Backing Resources (Azure storage, ScaleSets, Microbuild, etc)
  • Guidance and best practices

Classes of Updates to Communicate

  • Breaking - Breaks something. This type is the most severe and should be a rare occurrence
  • Disruptive - Change doesn’t break, but either adds debt with the product teams OR is considered risky
    • Examples: release pipelines, licensing, cert removal
  • Minimal risk - Some risk, but likely will be fine (these might also be called “updates of note”)
    • Examples: new feature, notable bug fix, etc.
  • Minor, low risk - Very low risk, and most folks won't care.
    • Most changes are these last two bullets.
    • Examples: security update, minor bug fixes, etc

Engineering Services Policy for Updates

  • .NET Core Product release schedules are published and kept "top of mind" for the team
  • Tools will not automatically flow to release/shipping branches (only to master/dev)
  • No updates to shared services during stabilization period (often a week) leading up to release
  • Published bar for when we’ll take changes Arcade Change Bar
  • Published bar used for determining class of update/change Arcade Change Bar

Communication Mechanics/Methods

  • Breaking changes follow procedure Arcade Changes Policy document
  • Disruptive changes follow procedure Arcade Changes Policy document
  • Release notes with “updates of note” (human crafted)
    • Done every time an update is deployed for our services
    • Done at most weekly for tools (e.g. Arcade SDK)
    • Done when items of note occur in one of our backing resources. For example, public feeds for Azure Artifacts
  • Blog entry for larger features/updates of interest

Automation

The intent is to provide access to a change log which contains all PR’s and the latest SHAs which is always available. (NOTE: this is not yet implemented)

  • Log is auto generated and posted (not emailed)
  • Is not always categorized by type of change because of automation, e.g. breaking etc (add ML in the future?)
  • Resource updates and 2nd party services are out of scope for this automation piece