It can be tricky, and time-consuming, to bounce between browser tabs and keep track of important markers of release health as you run your rollouts. Runway already pulls in a lot of the important signals, and now we’re giving them a real home! With the new Monitoring section in each release, we’re consolidating stability monitoring, user reviews, phased release status and, soon, product analytics – giving you one place to go to keep tabs on the health of rollouts.
We know that different team members collaborate on releases in different ways, and sometimes folks need to weigh in more efficiently. That’s why we’re introducing Runway slash commands in Slack. Your team can now do things like update the status of regression testing, mark a checklist item as completed, or update an Approvals item, just-in-time and all without leaving Slack. To see a list of available commands, just type `/runway help`. And, if there are other Runway actions you’d like us to add, let us know!
With so many moving pieces, it can be hard to keep track of everything that’s happening during release cycles – and even harder to make sense of things after the fact, if you need to retro or audit a release. To help your team understand exactly what is changing during releases, across all your tools and contributors, we’ve revamped event timelines in Runway. At release level, and also within individual steps, you now get a more complete and detailed picture of every single change and status update – plus, key upcoming lifecycle events and deadlines.  Â
For teams that apply late-arriving fixes to release branches, merging those changes back into your working branch (not to mention any other in-flight release branches) is an annoying manual process that wastes your time week-in, week-out. Now, Runway can automate all backmerges for you!    Â
You can now leverage Runway’s powerful functionality in concert with your team’s own internal tooling with the new Runway REST API. Using the API, you can create and update releases in Runway, update the status of checklist items, and more. To get started, create an API key from your organization’s settings page, then head to our API reference docs to learn more about the types of endpoints available.Â
Missing something your team needs? Let us know! We’ll be expanding the functionality of the API based on feedback.
(Available on the Runway Pro plan and above)
In the other direction, if you need Runway to call out to your stack when certain changes happen during release cycles, this can now be accomplished using outgoing webhooks. You can hook into events like release kickoff or rollout, release pilot changes, and checklist item status updates (plus many more!) to further customize your release workflow in response to changes happening within Runway and across your tools.
To get started using webhooks, add a new endpoint in the Webhooks section of your organization’s settings. You can choose which event types to subscribe to, as well as the specific apps you’re interested in receiving events for.
To see the full list of event types supported, and to explore the structure of the webhook payloads, check out our webhooks reference docs.
(Available on the Runway Pro plan and above)
We often hear that teams care about putting together beta tester notes for each release, but they waste time having to manually copy-paste the notes every time a new beta build lands.Now, Runway can automatically carry over your “What to Test” or “Release notes” from a previous beta build to the next ones.
If your team is one of the ones that always has to provide review attachments when you submit your iOS updates, you no longer need to waste time manually uploading those each and every release. Save your usual review attachment in Runway just once, and we’ll handle the rest automatically going forward.
Get a better understanding of how things are tracking throughout your release cycles and identify any areas that could use extra attention or improvement with release insights. Runway collects a whole range of statistics over the course of each release, and now we’re aggregating and surfacing that relevant data in a number of ways.
At the top of the release timeline, you’ll now find the Release overview page. Here, you can see a number of important high-level statistics about your release broken out into different sections. The specific data surfaced depends on whether the release has already been completed or is still in progress, ensuring what you see stays contextually relevant. Some examples include:
Many statistics on the page also surface a “Change” value, representing the difference in this stat between the current release and a historical average across previous releases. Looking at changes is a great way to pinpoint areas of your team’s release process that perhaps need special attention or could use improvements.
The Organization overview page zooms out and looks at release stats in aggregate for your apps and your whole organization. Here, you can view statistical averages and associated trends, at the level of granularity that makes the most sense for your organization. This is a great way to keep tabs on the bigger picture, and it provides a new level of visibility both for your immediate team and for other stakeholders.Â
Be sure to keep an eye on these new Release and Organization overviews – we’ll continue to add more insightful stats that can help your team gain a better understanding of how your releases are tracking over time and where improvements could be made. Have a specific statistic you’d like to see surfaced in these views? Don’t be shy – let us know!
Runway will now analyze new stability issues in each release and match them with suspect commits to help you more quickly identify their root cause and speed up triaging!
When Runway detects one or more potentially suspect commits for a new stability issue, you’ll see a special icon next to it in the list of top issues for the release. Clicking on that issue opens a new drawer, with a list of commits that Runway flagged as potential culprits.
Additionally, Runway will highlight any work items in the Feature Readiness step that contain code that has been flagged as suspect. Clicking into the work item’s drawer, you’ll now find a stability issues section which lists any issues that were linked to the work item.
Finally, a new stability issues filter on the Feature Readiness step will let you quickly find all suspect work items that have been linked to one or more specific stability issues.
Teams rely on the Feature Readiness step to understand exactly what is shipping with each release, and to identify inconsistencies and potential blockers before they turn into showstoppers. We’ve now made this even easier and more dependable.
There’s a new tabbed layout, allowing you to easily jump between “pending” and “done” buckets, and item-level data is rearranged for at-a-glance clarity and to accommodate more useful info, like project names and ticket labels.Â
Clicking on an item’s row will open a new details drawer. Navigate here to see the full run-down on a particular item of work, with extra info drawn from across your different tools.
We’re especially excited to add associated builds to the Feature Readiness step, to help point your entire team in the right direction when they need to check out particular work. Runway will now surface the latest relevant build each item of work can be found in: either your latest or selected Release Candidate build, or else the latest working branch build. (Or, if the item of work hasn’t yet appeared in any build, that’s communicated clearly as well.)
Note that if your working branch build workflow is different than your Release Candidate workflow, you’ll want to hop into your app’s CI/CD integration settings in Runway and set the correct working branch workflow to get fully up and running.
We’ve added even more filters that you can use to hone in on specific subsets of items: you can now filter items by project, ticket owner, code author, and code or ticket status. And, with the addition of various sorting options, you should be able to fine-tune the Feature Readiness view to make it most useful both to you as an individual contributor and on a team level.Â
Runway now shows top stability issues for every release! These are surfaced both on the app overview screen and on the “Release” step within each release. New issues for a given release are bucketed and highlighted accordingly. (Available for Bugsnag and Sentry integrations to start with; we hope to follow with Firebase Crashlytics soon.)Â
Although we’re always happy to help out with user management, you can now do more of that yourselves! Runway now supports self-service editing of user roles and removal of users from your organization. For either action, head to your org settings screen and click the gear icon next to a user.
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We’ve put some effort into improving the self-service experience around notifications, so you can fine-tune exactly which messages go where (even to release-specific channels!). Here’s what that entails:
Many of our Android teams rely on Runway to automate their staged rollouts, and a common ask has been for customization of the default 7-day rollout schedule.
Now, you can customize your staged Android rollouts to suit your team’s needs! In “Release defaults” in your app’s settings, just specify the number of days in your rollout and define the rollout percentage for each day, and Runway will do the rest.
