Change Management

All new product features and architecture improvements (components) pass through each the following steps at least once. A component may pass through certain phases several times before it can be moved to the next stage.

1. Requirements gathering
   Market-facing team members meet with the Product team on a regular basis to share requirements for new product components.
2. Specification
   A detailed specification is drawn up by the Product team, including diagrams, descriptions and mockups where applicable.
3. Review
   The specification is reviewed and signed-off by the relevant party.
4. Customer consultation
   Where relevant, customers are consulted to provide feedback on the component specification.
5. Estimation
   The Engineering Team estimates the relative size of development work.
6. Roadmap
   The component is placed on the Product Roadmap and assigned a priority relative to other tasks.
7. Development
   Development begins when the component reaches the top of the Roadmap queue. All development work includes (where appropriate):
   1. Unit tests
   2. Functional tests
   3. Internal code review
8. QA
   Completed components pass through quality assurance testing on staging servers by the QA team.
9. Documentation
   New components are documented on the Knowledge Base by the Support team (where applicable) for the benefit of all customers.
10. Notification
    All affected customers are notified at least one week in advance of the release of new features. Opt-in or opt-out preferences may apply to some components.
11. Release
    The component is released on production systems.
12. Monitoring and feedback
    The performance of the component is monitored on an ongoing basis and customer feedback is sought to improve future components.

Customers may need to opt-in before certain features are enabled for their account. This applies particularly to paid-for optional extras.