Brief Overview

SaaS applications constantly evolve — adding features and making behind-the-scenes HTML changes that affect how the application works. While application developers handle most of these changes, builders need to understand release cycles to keep their WalkMe content functioning correctly.

This article covers how to track application release schedules, understand your environment hierarchy, and plan periodic WalkMe content maintenance.

Use Cases

Understanding software release best practices helps builders:

• Prevent WalkMe content from breaking after a major application update
• Test WalkMe items against upcoming releases before they reach production
• Prioritize which content to review and maintain based on usage data

Understand Your Application Release Schedule

Most applications update on a scheduled release cycle and typically give customers about a month's advance notice before a production release. Release types vary by vendor, but generally fall into three categories:

1. Major releases (generally two to three times per year)
   • Application vendors batch new features and major UI updates into large software updates. These updates can fundamentally change how users interact with the application.
2. Minor releases (frequent)
   • Small software changes that improve existing features or processes. Vendors release these independently of major releases when they meaningfully improve the user experience.
3. Software patches (frequent)
   • Bug fixes that address issues impairing user experience or application functionality. These are released as soon as the issue is identified.

Understand Your Environment Hierarchy

Different environments indicate different levels of software readiness. At a basic level, most applications have a production environment and a sandbox or preview environment:

• The production environment is where the business runs its real operations, with live data and active business processes.
• The sandbox or preview environment mirrors production as closely as possible and is where updates are tested before release.

In practice, an application may have several sandbox or preview environments — some use real data, some use test data, and some differ significantly from production. These environments can also follow different release schedules, which affects your ability to test upcoming changes.

WalkMe recommends building and testing your content on a sandbox or preview environment that matches production as closely as possible. For major application releases, test on an environment that has the upcoming updates and represents what production will look like after the release.

Periodic Maintenance of Your WalkMe Content

Once you understand your application release schedule and environment hierarchy, you can plan when and where to review your WalkMe content to make sure it keeps pace with your application.

WalkMe recommends selecting 30 of your most important WalkMe items — use Insights usage data or business goals to prioritize — and running them on your current application one to two weeks before a scheduled major release. Then, as soon as you have access to the upcoming release, run those same 30 items on the new version. This helps you identify exactly what changed in the release, compared to any issues that existed before.

Quality Assurance Testing