When I joined AgileAssets 3 years ago, one of the concerns I heard was that upgrades were difficult and issues were not being proactively addressed. We took these concerns seriously and implemented a phased approach to improve your experience as quickly as possible with upgrades to our enterprise asset management software.
In the first phase, we shortened the upgrades to a 6-month cadence and began providing each update to all clients. When we released 7.1 we were able to increase our proactive responses to deliveries every quarter. We also committed to making upgrades and service packs require less effort and disruption. The word from most customers has been that, though initially upgrading to a 7.1 or later release is challenging, the subsequent updates go much more smoothly. We have several customers who are installing 7.1 updates as they come out each quarter. We have found that the smaller, focused releases have been less disruptive and of better quality.
With the release of version 7.2 in March of this year, we have enacted the latest phase. We have moved from quarterly updates to updates every 7 weeks – and we have already delivered 7.2.1 and 7.2.2, with 7.2.3 planned for September. We are now providing fixes and enhancements in each update so you get new features for the mobile apps and the web application. Feedback on these has been that the quality is even better than the prior releases.
To make this possible, we have strengthened and automated more of our test infrastructure to do more in less time. We are now testing all client environments every night to eliminate many of the bugs we were finding during upgrades long before you ever start your actual upgrade. We have also improved quality and reduced regressions by integrating client care and our project delivery teams into the build and release processes.
Looking forward, by next April’s International Users Conference (IUC), we are striving to start delivering updates quickly and directly to our Hosted and SaaS customers without impacting operations. IUC has traditionally been a great time to share information and get feedback on how these updates and changes are working in your deployments. Hope to see you there!
Written by: Michael Lester on September 15, 2017