Planning for Success with TechnoMile Product Releases
Three times per year, TechnoMile releases new features and updates to our technology, enabling our clients to take advantage of the latest and greatest capabilities that our solutions have to offer. As a TechnoMile Admin, getting maximum benefit from these releases is made easier by understanding the basics of our release process and best practices to prepare for a release.
Release Schedule
TechnoMile has 3 major product releases every year in March, June, and October. Below are the official release dates for 2025.
Major Product Release Lifecycle
At TechnoMile, we follow an agile development lifecycle for each major release. We start by planning each release and then we have 5 to 6 sprints (15 to 18 weeks) of development before a feature freeze. After that date, we focus on release readiness leading up to our official release when the new/enhanced features are available for deployment to your production environment. Let’s review the phases of the lifecycle in more detail.
| Release Phase | What’s Happening | More Details |
| Planning | Our Product Management team plans for what they want to complete in the upcoming major release. They review their product roadmap, product feedback from clients, and known issues. | Have product enhancements ideas? Your TechnoMile Customer Success Manager can pass your feedback on to our Product Management team. |
| Agile Development | Once planning is complete, teams organize the work into sprints where they focus on specific features to build and test. The development cycle ends with a feature freeze, the date when all incomplete features are removed from the upcoming release. | Build, test, repeat. All features go through a series of unit, functional, and performance tests before being added to a release. After feature freeze, teams begin the process again for the development of the next release. |
| Release Readiness | At feature freeze, only completed features that have been tested, validated, and approved are included in the release. | Additional tests are performed, including backward compatibility testing, integration tests, functional tests, database and deployment script validation, along with customer use case validation. During this phase, TechnoMile offers a Release Preview, allowing clients to “test drive” the release in their own sandbox environment. For clients with customizations, testing should be completed in your sandbox to verify the release’s compatibility with your unique customizations. See more information and best practices here. Any bugs identified by TechnoMile or clients during testing are researched and reviewed for possible fixes. Once a fix has been identified and any code changes occur, they are tested thoroughly and the patch is applied to the impacted package. |
| Official Release Deployment | At release freeze, TechnoMile releases new features either via our automated push upgrade program or via a scheduled push coordinated with the client. | Speak with your TechnoMile Customer Success Manager for questions regarding your automated push upgrade or to coordinate your scheduled push. |
Release Communications
Now that you understand the release schedule and lifecycle, let’s take a look at the communications and resources that you’ll receive from TechnoMile to help ensure that you’re release-ready:
- Key Release Dates Notification – Roughly 2 months prior to the next release, we include “Key Dates to Know” for the upcoming release in our monthly client News to Know e-newsletter. If you aren’t currently receiving these newsletters, sign up here.
- Release Notice – Roughly 1 month prior to the release, we publish the Release Notice in our monthly client News to Know e-newsletter. The Release Notice provides an overview of all new and enhanced features and bug fixes included in the upcoming release, as well as a link to register for the upcoming release webinar.
- Release Notes and New/Updated Product Documentation – 3 weeks before the official release, release notes and new/updated configuration and user guides are posted in the TechnoMile Customer Success Portal, providing additional information about new/enhanced features.
- Release Webinar – The week prior to the official release, TechnoMile hosts a release webinar where our Product Management team demos the new/enhanced features included in the release. Visit the Events section of our website to register for this webinar.
Reviewing these resources will help you determine what the release means for your company, what action you may need to take as your organization’s TechnoMile Admin to ensure a smooth upgrade, and what communication or training may be needed to enable your end users.
Key Dates to Know for the Next Product Release
Below are the key dates to know for the upcoming 2025.1 release:
| Launch Event | Date | Notes | Related Links |
| Release Notice | February 6, 2025 | Notification regarding new/enhanced features and bug fixes included in the 2025.1 release | |
| Release Preview | February 10, 2025 | Release available to preview in sandbox environment | |
| Release Webinar | February 27, 2025 | Demo of new and enhanced features provided by Product Management team | |
| Official Release | March 3, 2025 | Release available for deployment to clients |
How to Prepare for a TechnoMile Product Release
Many clients use TechnoMile’s out-of-the-box solutions and available configuration options to meet their organization’s Growth and/or Contracts needs. For these clients, participating in our push upgrade program is the best option.
With our push upgrade program, the latest package(s), which have been extensively tested to ensure backward compatibility with our out-of-the-box solutions, are automatically applied to your production environment on the official release date. Client Admins then leverage provided configuration guides to enable new/enhanced features, as desired. For these clients, it may be helpful to participate in the Release Preview in your sandbox so that your Client Admin can practice enabling and configuring features before the release and is prepared to roll them out to your users.
However, some TechnoMile clients have opted to customize TechnoMile’s software to satisfy unique business needs, either with the help of TechnoMile’s Professional Services team or their own internal resources. In these cases, a more extensive release preparation process, including testing, is recommended to ensure a smooth transition to the latest TechnoMile product release. This process is described in the next section.
Release Best Practices for Customized Environments
For clients with customizations to their TechnoMile software, we highly recommend taking advantage of our Release Preview so that you can try out and test features related to your customizations in a sandbox environment prior to deploying them to production.
Testing During the Release Preview
What should your testing involve? Any modifications to your solution’s codebase may inadvertently introduce regressions, which are changes that negatively impact existing functionality. This means you should focus your testing on any new/enhanced features that may impact custom code built by TechnoMile’s Professional Services team or your own internal resources. What types of testing should be considered?
- Unit Tests – Unit tests are important if you have any kind of custom coding in your environment. They focus on the smallest bits (also known as units) of low-level code that’s been added to your environment. The goal is to catch bugs early to avoid costly fixes later.
- Integration Tests – Integration tests apply if you have code interacting with anything that’s not native in your environment. For example, if you’re exchanging data with your company’s ERP system.
- Functional Tests – Functional tests verify that features work as defined in your technical requirements. These can sometimes be carried out by end users and merged with user acceptance testing.
- User Acceptance Tests (UAT) – User acceptance tests (UAT) give end users the opportunity to accept or reject the final feature delivery. You can couple this with end-user training if user feedback is relatively easy to implement. To prioritize your functional and UAT testing efforts, a good rule of thumb is to focus on testing high value or high usage business processes.
- Performance Testing – Performance testing evaluates how your system responds when large volumes of records or operations are being handled.
Now that you’re familiar with the main types of testing, which type of tests should you use? Your testing plans should reflect the degree of your solution’s customizations:
- Minor customizations – If you have small amounts of custom code in your environment, you should conduct unit tests as well as functional and UAT testing. You can build and run tests manually.
- More extensive customizations – If you have more complex custom code, your company may wish to invest in automated testing tools. These tools execute tests automatically each time your codebase changes to check for any bugs that may have been introduced. This kind of test automation is called continuous integration (CI). When you change your source code and push it to a source control repository (such as Git), your CI tool executes the scripts you’ve written for your unit, integration, functional, and user interface (UI) tests. Once you choose your CI tool, you need to set up a CI environment. Then you build custom jobs and tasks to automate your test scripts.
Preparing Your Sandbox and Testing
Here are some tips for preparing your sandbox(es) and executing your test plan:
- You will need to have one or more sandboxes for testing. Be sure to let your TechnoMile Customer Success Manager know if you would like your sandbox(es) refreshed with the Release Preview. We may need you to provide us with sandbox details, such as instance number, to ensure you receive the Release Preview.
- If you’re working with developer sandboxes, these won’t copy over any of your production data, so you will need to create test data.
- Refer to the configuration guides, found in the TechnoMile Customer Success Portal, for information on enabling and configuring new features in the release.
- If you’re working on a large project with many users, consider using a UI tool for dedicated UI tests that lets you evaluate different operating systems, browsers, devices, and accessibility requirements. One such example is Selenium, an open source industry standard for UI testing. UI issues can sometimes be related to an end-user’s device, browser, or user profile, so test the most common combinations.
- Test on a needs-driven basis. Budget in time to address any issues. A bug detected and fixed in the test phase costs significantly less than one resolved in production.
- Be aware of false positives (that is, tests that fail even though the functionality works). You may need to test your tests!
Have Questions?
Still have questions about preparing for a successful TechnoMile product release? Speak with your Customer Success Manager.