We’ve recently had a couple of releases where no changes were required that cycle.
This is becoming more frequent with the advent of more Frequent Delivery, but is also occurring where products are so small that they have a tiny chance of having inactive content each cycle.
This has happened recently with some Extensions, where the decision falls with the Product Owners and therefore the NRC’s make a call as to whether or not they want to publish a Release with zero changes. This is dependent on their users use cases, and therefore has a clear business case either way.
However, it has also occurred with some of the smaller Derivative products such as ERA - in this case we are the product owners, but from an International perspective have less visibility of the impact to end users.
Therefore, we make the decisions based on priorities, and whether we believe the members would like us to spend our time publishing releases that have Zero changes. This decision is usually made in favour of not publishing another release where no changes would be made to the previously published content.
However, we also wanted to double check with you to ensure that this is as you’d like it to be, and that you wouldn’t prefer the certainty of having a new ERA release, or GP/FP release, etc - even though it has no changes, to ensure that you know that you’re using the latest product?
Perhaps this would also be different depending on whether or not it’s a
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Formally Published Refset product
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Informally Published freeset (in PDF format)?
EVERYONE AGREED - WE NEED TO PUBLISH A FORMAL POLICY ON RELEASE SCHEDULES (inc. “NON-RELEASES”) and then folllow it ourselves