Writing Release Notes Proving to be an Enigma

Products are updated by their manufacturers following the market demands of the customers. After every updation, the manufacturer releases the new version of the product along with a Release Notes. This Release Notes talks about so many things about the product in terms of defects/bugs, enhancements, changes made to the existing features, etc. And every manufacturer tries to give precise and correct information in the Release Notes. Since there is no universal format about how to write the Release Notes, every company follows its own standards in presenting the content and layout design.

All over the world, there is a convention among the Release Notes documenters that the Release Notes should be written in Present Tense. But at the same time, all companies don't follow this rule religiously. Again, there is no consensus about how much content should be provided to the reader of the Release Notes relating to a particular topic. In companies, this decision is always taken by the Documentation Head in a subjective way. That means, whatever goes as part of the content to the reader, depends on the wish of the Documentation Head. Nobody is quite sure about the content aspect. Some companies try to write the Release Notes as a mini-guide but a few others go for providing conceptual outline for the changes done along with respective guide links, where the new content in detail has been updated. Reader can click the guide links and read the content in detail, if s/he wants. < /P>

A few documenters debate about which tense should be used in Release Notes. As per them, if you are writing the Release Notes about a defect, then the problem part should be written in Past tense and the Solution should be written in the Present Tense. But, all over the world, documenters insist on writing all the Release Notes in Present Tense. A few others write in whatever tense they feel convenient; these guys argument is that they are mainly targeting the reader understanding aspect. Therefore, the stress is not upon the tense and sentence structure part but on the readability part.

In summary, how to write a proper Release Notes is proving to be a mystery for the new writer. Since the writer's content is always at the mercy of the Content Reviewer, there is much not scope on the part of the writer regarding how much content should be provided to the reader. Unfortunately, there is not much content available in the Net relating to the Release Notes.