Release notes

When you release that great new version of your software, your customers are going to want to know what's fixed and what new features you're giving them. FogBugz makes it easy to maintain release notes as you go along, by attaching a release note to any case.

• You will almost certainly not want to add release notes to every case. Some are too trivial for customers to care about. Others might reflect bugs that were introduced during development and fixed before any customer had a chance to see them, so customers will have no reason to care.
• FogBugz does not attempt to compose release notes automatically based on the bug report, because bug reports are not usually worded the way you want your release notes to be worded: they include insider jargon, abbreviations, etc. Instead FogBugz expects you to write a custom release note for each case, although of course you can cut and paste.

Once a case is resolved, you can add a release note to it simply by clicking on the link in the margin marked Add Release Note and type in the release note.

To see all the release notes for a particular release (a.k.a. "fix for"), choose Reports | Release Notes. Choose the release you are working on, and you will see a list of cases that were resolved for that release. From here you can go to any of those cases to write or edit any release note.

At the bottom of this screen, there are two small icons, one marked HTML and one marked XML.

The HTML icon displays all the release notes on one page. It uses extremely clean HTML with all formatting done in a style sheet. You can use your favorite HTML editor to format the release notes any way you like. By editing the styles you can control the formatting of the entire release notes document to match your exact requirements.

The XML icon displays the same data in plain XML format, suitable for any further processing you may need to do to integrate the release notes with your web site or documentation or any other electronic interchange or content management system.