Billing Application Release 274: April 2020

[Huiying]

The planned deployment schedule is as follows:
EU Sandbox Release: from 04/16/2020 (Thursday) PT to 04/17/2020 (Friday) PT
US Sandbox Release: from 04/16/2020 (Thursday) PT to 04/17/2020 (Friday) PT
EU Production Release: from 04/21/2020 (Tuesday) PT to 04/23/2020 (Thursday) PT
US Production Release: from 04/21/2020 (Tuesday) PT to 04/23/2020 (Thursday) PT

No service disruption is expected for this release.
Release Notes for release 274 will be published under Zuora Release Notes after Sandbox release. Release status and release notes link will be posted as this article comments. 

[Huiying]

Release 274 was deployed to the EU and US Sandbox successfully.

[perswardh]

Is it as inteded that release notes for the application is empty? Nothing fixed or changed there?

[Jing]

@perswardh This release includes REST API updates and internal enhancements. You can check the API Changelog for detailed API updates. Thank you!

[perswardh]

@Jing Thanks for the clarification. Just wanted to make sure that the release notes for the application was not missed. Maybe good to state that so there are no misunderstanding

[TrixabelleCP]

I completely agree with @perswardh - it would be great if you can state "no changes" so it's clear it wasn't that the notes aren't ready yet (which seems to happen quite often). 

[kylebeach]

It appears that Collect: Advanced Payment Manager has been updated in release 274 as the UI is significantly different, however there are no release notes listed for Collect: Advanced Payment Manager.

What changed?  Was it strictly a UI change?

Please address the significant problems with release note accuracy.

[Heng]

Hi @kylebeach , We apologize for the inconvenience that it caused. You can now find the Collect Release Notes here:
https://knowledgecenter.zuora.com/Zuora_Release_Notes/Zuora_Collect_Release_Notes/April_21%2C_2020_-...

The release of Advanced Payment Manager in Collect is separate from the Billing 274 release. It went out earlier today. We plan to publish the release notes right after the actual release. Because of the time differences between our engineering and docs teams, there was a delay in announcing the release. 

Because Collect and Billing have different release cycles, Collect release notes are not included in Billing release notes. Collect release notes are all placed on this page. 
https://knowledgecenter.zuora.com/Zuora_Release_Notes/Zuora_Collect_Release_Notes

In the future, we'll improve the timeliness of release notes and will consider having pre-release notifications. Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or suggestions. 

[kylebeach]

Thank you. 

Publishing release notes prior to a production release for Billing, Collect or otherwise is a must.  It is not acceptable to learn of functionality changes to production for mission critical components like payment processing after they are released.

Additionally, Collect (and all connect apps) should be released to sandbox with release notes prior to a production release so adequate testing can be performed ahead of release to production.

[Heng]

@kylebeach Thanks a lot for understanding and for the feedback! I'll pass the feedback and the suggestion to our engineering and product teams. 

[Huiying]

Release 274 was deployed to EU and US Production successfully.