The Freeze Release Policy: Fewer Changes During Your Busy Season

Listening to our clients is one of the core tenets of our company. One of the key pieces of feedback has been to reduce the number of changes during the busiest times of year. Starting last April, we implemented a freeze over any releases in the last two weeks before important deadlines (such as April 15 or October 15). We want to be fully transparent and explain our thought process and logic.

What is a release freeze?

In the clearest terms, it means that we do not push new code to production. We’re still working on it and we’re still developing our software — but the code does not reach the users during this time.

Benefits of a release freeze

You are able to work during your busy season and not have to worry about changes in the interface you’re used to, or new bugs.

Downsides of a release freeze

Features that are ready are held back during these two weeks. Since we do not push to production, some bugs may be slower to be fixed immediately after the freeze release. This is because code has been sitting on the sidelines, and we’ve paused the continual testing we do for every release. The effects of this downside are temporary.

Are any bugs still fixed during a freeze?

Mission-critical bugs – if you cannot upload documents, cannot sign document, etc. – are still fixed, but otherwise nothing gets pushed to production. While we’ve heard a few requests to not make any changes at all during “busy season,” some bug fixes and changes cannot wait.

We believe in constant improvement

As everything in life, every decision has a plus and a minus — we are happy to make the above tradeoff and wanted to explain our logic, as we realized this has been in place all year, but we didn’t communicate it. We listen to your feedback and we’re excited to continuously make your (and your clients’) experience better.