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Why a Changelog is Important for Agile Companies

Posted by Fabian Seibt | June 14, 2022

Keeping your audience and team updated with what you do is an essential factor to business success. Interacting with your audience and keeping them up-to-date with the latest changes in your project or product makes them feel involved and helps them use it better. The same goes for your team. You have to keep them updated with what changes are being made in order to keep them agile and help them make quick and independent decisions. The best way to achieve this is through the use of a changelog. This article talks about why a changelog is important for agile companies to keep their teams effective and productive.

What are Changelogs ?

As the name suggests, a changelog is a log of changes made to a project or product. All the changes that are ever made to the project are stored by date in chronological order. What is being added, removed, or amended is all stored in a changelog by the date.

The other additional information that is stored in a changelog depends on the company and who they are targetting. If it is a changelog for the audience, they will explain in simple words that they have X changes in X areas. If it is for the company itself, changelogs could be more details and personalized.

You might have seen that whenever a software gets an update, there are some release notes with it that explain the latest updates and bug fixes, etc. A changelog is somewhat similar to this but visually engaging. It shows what change was made on what date and contains less technical jargon so that a normal audience can understand. Excellent tools like Loggify can help you make a visually appealing changelog.

Why are Changelogs Used?

Companies need to constantly update their audience and team about the changes they are making. For the audience, they can stay updated about the upcoming features and how to use them. It can help them navigate and use new features easily.

For the company itself, changelogs can help teams be more productive and respond fast to changes. For example, if the development team is working on new features, they will create a changelog and explain what they are changing e.g. changing button layout, the color, functionality, and how the new features will look. This visual display will give the rest of the teams an idea of what’s new. This would help them act accordingly, take independent decisions that best serve the company, and be agile.

Why Are Changelogs Important for Companies?

What is the true potential of having a changelog for your company? What are the ways in which different teams can truly benefit from it? Let’s figure it out!

A changelog is a great way to announce updates

The most obvious advantage of a changelog is that they keep everyone updated. The company can announce new updates across their teams without having to arrange meetings or long presentations. Teams need to act quickly and hence you can’t afford to lose time arranging lengthy meetings. A changelog is a perfect way to tell everyone about updates without having to brief them. Just create a changelog at once and it will automatically reach your team through Loggify’s sharing features.  

It keeps the whole team updated on the new features

Cross-channel communication is important and tools like Loggify help achieve that. You can share the changelog directly into your project and team management tools like Slack, Teams, Zaiper, MailChimp, etc. Design a changelog once and let it reach all the teams so they can know which team is working on what. None of the teams get left behind this way.

It enables the team to take independent decisions

In a business environment where consumer interests and demands evolve at a fast pace, you need to give some authority to the teams and trust them to make their own decisions in the best interests of the company. Changelogs help you with that by updating them so they don’t miss anything. It helps them be independent and change their strategy accordingly. For example, the customer support team would learn about new updates, and design FAQs, chatbots, and guides accordingly. The marketing team would start marketing the new update without having to wait for any order from executives. Changelogs enable teams to be independent in decision-making. This improves your company’s productivity and saves a lot of time.

Changelog also helps companies find issues and debug

No, we are not talking about coding changelogs. Let’s say your project or product starts reacting in an odd way or is facing a bug. You would know exactly when it started to appear through changelogs. Everything will be chronologically ordered by date and you can just jump right to the date where a certain feature was added or removed that could have caused the issue. If you know which feature is facing a bug, you can also find other related changes through the changelog that were released in the same update. All this will improve the general understanding of your development team and help them take quick action.

Why is Loggify the best changelog tool for Companies?

Loggify provides you with a range of options where you can share your changelog. The process is very engaging and easy. You can design a changelog and it will automatically be distributed across all the channels that you select including your website, Slack, Teams, Zapier, and social media platforms. Your team can instantly come to know about the latest changes and upcoming updates. 

While making a changelog, you also have the option to select the visibility of the changelog from where you can select if you want to show this changelog to the general public or just your team. This great option helps keep everything organized. Using stunning visuals and excellent formatting, you can design a great changelog for your team and make your project successful!

Try it out today!