Cute release notes

Ben Brooks takes on the trend of cute stories inside of release notes:

“With disturbingly increasing frequency, companies are deciding to let their marketing departments handle their release notes instead of the engineering team or product manager.”

I agree. These were fun at first, but the release notes don’t need to be entertainment. They should be a summary of what changed, with bullet points for key changes. (A single “bug fixes” line is also not helpful.)

I personally like to start each line with a clear statement: “Fixed <something>” or “Added <this feature>” or “Improved <something else> by <doing this>”. You can see this in the history of my Tweet Library release notes, for example.

Manton Reece @manton