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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
We’ve made the stakeholder approval process a first class citizen within Runway – simply add items to your approvals list, optionally assign ownership roles, and let your team take it from there. Stakeholders can easily pop into Runway to flag or approve items for the release, and they can also leave comments on items if needed.
If an approval item does have an ownership role associated with it, only users with the appropriate role will be able to update its status. As your team works its way through approvals, everyone can stay on the same page thanks to real-time updates sent to your Slack channel.
We know some of our teams have been using checklist items as a lightweight regression test scripting tool, so we expanded and formalized this usage by adding the ability to create and run through dedicated regression test cases. They have more relevant statuses (In Progress, Blocked, Failed, and Passed) and can also now be commented on.
We’ve loved seeing our teams using Runway’s release schedule feature to keep their release train moving and on-time. But we also know that off-schedule releases occasionally need to be slotted in, and that that can sometimes throw off the schedule on upcoming releases.
Now, if an unplanned release enters the picture, Runway will automatically shift scheduled dates for upcoming releases, however the situation demands. For example, if a hotfix release is slotted in and delays the next scheduled release, Runway will shift that release’s dates over to the next cycle. If a regular release is slotted in, Runway will automatically apply appropriate target dates to that new release according to your cadence, and shift the following release’s dates.
As a reminder, you can view your release’s target dates in the schedule module accessible at the top of any step.
Previously, Runway would attempt to perform your kickoff, submission and release automations only once; if Runway was unable to execute the automation for any reason, things would end there, and you’d have to proceed manually. Now, Runway will retry these key automations up to five times, and will notify you if things still ended in failure at the end of the retry cycle. You’ll notice a ‘Retrying...’ status on the automations tab if Runway is in the process of retrying your automation.
