Release notes: New features should be at the top

Created February 10, 2010 19:06

New features and enhancements should always be at the top. The main usefulness of release notes for most of us is to keep up with new features and enhancements. Intermingling these with fixed bugs amounts to a denial of service attack on our brains, as we try to pick out the items that are useful to us.

The release notes format has changed many times and will probably continue to change. We used to have this, and it was lost. It should never be lost.

Also: new features whenever possible should be supported by images.

2 comments

Dmitry Jemerov

Created February 11, 2010 12:59

Hello Dave,

I've regenerated the release notes for the latest EAP build so that they
are now sorted by issue importance.

New features which are big enough to deserve screenshots are announced in
the IntelliJ IDEA blog.

New features and enhancements should always be at the top. The main
usefulness of release notes for most of us is to keep up with new
features and enhancements. Intermingling these with fixed bugs amounts
to a denial of service attack on our brains, as we try to pick out the
items that are useful to us.

The release notes format has changed many times and will probably
continue to change. We used to have this, and it was lost. It should
never be lost.

Also: new features whenever possible should be supported by images.

--
Dmitry Jemerov
Development Lead
JetBrains, Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com/
"Develop with Pleasure!"

Dave Yost

Created February 13, 2010 17:00

Sorting by issue importance is nice -- within each of two groups: features (first) and bugs (second).
Features need to come first as a separate group as I explained.

Also, whenever there is more info in the blog, there should be a link to that.

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