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Product Updates

The Runway REST API

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. 

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)

Outgoing webhooks

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)

New automations

Automatically carry over beta tester notes

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.

Automatically apply default review attachment files

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.

‍Improve your release practice with release insights

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.

Release overview

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:

  • The number of items of work that went into the release
  • The top contributing product teams for the release
  • The total number of commits in the release
  • The top code contributors for the release
  • The top files changed in the release
  • Timing info: cycle duration, average build times, review times, and more
Animation showing scrolling through the Release overview page for a release in Runway

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.

Organization overview

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. 

Animation showing scrolling through the Organization overview page in Runway

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!

Track down bugs more seamlessly with stability issue root-cause associations

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.

Animation showing navigating to stability issue root-cause associations for top issues for a release in Runway

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.

Screenshot showing information about suspect code associated with an item of work in Runway

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.

Feature Readiness 2.0

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.

A new look, and even more info

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. 

Screenshot showing improved tabbed interface for Feature Readiness in Runway

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.

Animation showing informational drawer for items in Feature Readiness in Runway

Item-level build info

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.)

Screenshot showing associated build info for items in Feature Readiness in Runway

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.

More filters, and sorting

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. 

Animation showing new Sort and Filter options in Feature Readiness in Runway

Top stability issues

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.) 

Animation showing a table of the top stability issues for a live release in Runway

Self-service user management

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.

Animation showing self-service user management functionality in Runway

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Notification settings

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:

  • You can now enable or disable each type of notification Runway sends on a granular level. And, specific notification types can be directed to any channel of your choosing, overriding your overall, “Primary channel” selection.
Animation showing configuring a Slack notification type to go to a custom specified channel in Runway
  • We know many teams create release-specific channels for each release, and Runway now supports – and helps automate – that! If a channel setting in Runway includes the “{version}” pattern, Runway will resolve that to a channel name for each release, using the appropriate release version. Additionally, Runway can now automatically create those release-specific channels in Slack if they don’t already exist. 
Animation showing entering a release-specific channel pattern in a Slack notification setting in Runway
  • All channel selections, both “Primary channel” and any notification-specific overrides, now support multiple channels each. If you need certain updates surfaced in more than one place, enter multiple channels and Runway will send messages to all.
Animation showing configuring a Slack notification from Runway to be sent to multiple channels

Custom Android staged rollouts

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.

Animation showing configuring a custom multi-day staged rollout in Runway


Self-service account creation

Now, new team members can create their own accounts on Runway! And, as long as their email domain matches one of the allowed domains associated with your organization, they’ll automatically be added to your Runway org. Sign in with Google and GitHub are also now available, helping you onboard even more smoothly. Note that if you have SSO/SAML configured, your new team members should continue signing up via that flow.

Firebase stability monitoring integration

We know many teams are using Firebase for crash reporting (RIP Crashlytics), so we’re excited to announce that we’ve finally added it as another one of our stability monitoring integrations in Runway! Google certainly doesn’t make things easy, since there’s no API, but it turns out a combination of BigQuery exports and Firebase Analytics data makes an integration possible. To guide you through setup, we've created detailed Firebase setup documentation.

Screenshot showing stability monitoring information from Firebase within Runway

Automatic dSYM download & upload

Say goodbye to the annoying dSYM download/upload dance! Runway can now automatically download dSYMs for all builds sent to App Store Connect and then upload those dSYMs to your stability monitoring platform. Currently available for our Sentry and Bugsnag integrations – we hope to add Firebase support soon.

Screenshot showing the status of dSYMs uploaded to Sentry by Runway

Invite your team via email

To make the process of adding new team members even easier, you can now invite any number of people to join your organization in Runway. Each person will receive an email invite and will be immediately added to your org.

Animation showing a flow of inviting teammates to Runway

Docs

‍Although we do truly love interacting directly with you all and talking through questions and answers over Slack, we finally put together some documentation which should help address the most common questions and areas of confusion. Head to https://docs.runway.team and keep an eye out as we update and add to the content there!