Release Notes

Get a human-readable summary of what the team completed recently and share it with stakeholders.

Overview

Release Notes is an AI-powered feature that compiles all your completed work and generates a concise summary. This is particularly useful for sharing updates with stakeholders via Slack.

Basics

Generation

Haystack leverages issue metadata like titles, descriptions, and parent tasks to generate release notes.

Timeframes

Haystack generates release notes for Scrum teams per sprint and for Kanban teams per week.

Categories

Release notes categorize your work into three buckets: Features, Bugs, and Other.

Underlying issues

Each Release Notes bullet point contains a link to view underlying issues.

See underlying issues of each Release Notes bullet point

Share in Slack

To automatically share release notes to a Slack channel, click "Send automatic updates" and select the desired channel.

Send Release notes automatically in Slack

Release notes will be sent automatically at the end of each sprint (for Scrum teams) and at the beginning of the following week (for Kanban teams). Example Slack alert:

Slack Release Notes are designed to credit engineers who completed tasks by tagging them

Copy text

To add Release Notes to other tools, copy the content to your clipboard by clicking "Copy text" near the Release Notes title.

Copy and Paste you release notes to other tools

Share via URL

You can share the page URL with other Haystack users to access the exact Release Notes. Non-Haystack users can be invited to the platform at no extra charge.

Custom Release Notes

To create a summary for larger timeframes, select "Custom release notes" from the top right menu.

Custom Release Notes

Select date range

You can select dates up to 6 months in the past. All selected days start at 00:00 and end at 23:59 GMT.

Select group by

1. Auto (Features/Bugs/Other)

2. By epic

Configure

Once you select your configurations, click "Generate". Generating release notes may take some time depending on your data size. You can leave the page and return later; your release notes will be available in the dashboard once generated.

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FAQ

How are release notes generated?

Haystack uses GPT-4 to summarize all Jira issues moved to “Done” during the selected timeframe.

What data is used to generate release notes?

Haystack uses your definition of done based on the team’s project board. Every board defines it’s own statuses, each status mapped to a category (To Do, In Progress, Done). Haystack considers issues in the “Done” category to be released.

Do you have release notes for multiple teams?

No, release notes are currently supported for a single team. if you’d like to create multi-team release notes we suggest sending release notes to a shared #releases slack channel to collect release notes for each team

Can I re-generate release notes?

No, release notes are cached after they have been generated. If you’d like to re-generate release notes, message us at [e-mail]