Multiple Independant Releases within Master Releases

As an enterprise SaaS software provider, we need to manage releases in two key categories, major and minor, so that we can monitor the iterative delivery of our minor releases as a part of our major, less frequent, releases and provide clarity to our business, stakeholders, and customers.

Acceptance Criteria

• Master Releases can contain multiple Sub-Releases (already met)

• Master Releases can have specific Internal & External release dates set (already met)

• Sub-Release Internal & External release dates can be selected to:

  • align dates to Master automatically (already met)

  • have manual dates set within the bounds of the Master Release

  • (N.B Only - this is something that would be consistent with how date values can be calculated on other record types - see attachment)

Business Value

Aha is a great product for the roadmapping needs of larger organisations and holds a significant advantage over competitors in handling the more complex needs of such organisations. Aha can better serve the needs of customers in the enterprise SaaS provider market by allowing for a more flexible approach to handling releases that aligns with wider business/market communication needs. Enterprise customers are typically more laggard in their adoption and consumption of new product delivery which necessitates a more staged release model that is not currently supported by Aha Roadmaps.

Context

We offer a suite of products made up of 6 product-lines, each with individual product workspaces (c.20 in total). We deploy product changes very regularly, potentially daily, but we release plan "minor" 4-weekly releases to enable functionality for early adopter or beta customers. We operate a Major release cadence on a quarterly basis that encompasses everything delivered in the minor releases and will launch market announcements on this cadence as well as add/remove any features released to all customers. Both of these cadences are in place to ensure we can effectively engage with our customer base and the wider market.

Current Usage

We use master releases at the company product-line level to track our Major releases and set the dates accordingly. We attach Sub-releases at the product workspace level and the sub-releases encompass the features planned/delivered on a 4-weekly cadence and use a naming convention to illustrate those releases over time. The release date of the Sub-releases automatically sets itself to the Master Release release date. We manually set the "Date range" of each sub-Release to match the 4-weekly cadence so that we have a way to indicate dates. The fact the release date of the sub-releases is already set is creating confusion and makes a number of the inbuilt roadmap visualisations impractical to use.

Notes

This is an idea that was raised by another customer back in 2016 but was rejected https://big.ideas.aha.io/ideas/APP-I-2502. I have (naughtily) chosen to create it again for review but with much more detail provided in the hopes you better understand the problem.