Risks and release notes, answered in full.
Writing a risk somebody will act on, and a release note somebody will read.
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8 questions on risks and release notes, answered by Tenhaw, a UK AI consultancy and AI delivery partner based in London. Nothing here is a summary: each answer is the exact text from the page that owns it, and every group links back to that page for the context around it.
How to write a risk or issue
Answered on How to write a risk or issue, and rendered here in the same words.
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When a risk becomes an issue, do I raise a new item?
No. Change the type on the same record so the history stays attached: the original cause, the decide-by date, the response you chose and the date it converted. Probability stops applying, because the event has happened, so the value at risk becomes the exposure. Raising a fresh item hides how long you knew, which is the part worth learning from at roadmap close.
How do I set a probability when I have no data?
Ask how often this has happened to you before in similar circumstances, and start there. Estimate in tens, get a second person to write a number down independently before either of you speaks, and take the higher one if they disagree by more than twenty points. You are not trying to be right to the percentage point. You are trying to rank this item honestly against the other things on the log.
Our board wants a RAG status. Do we abandon that?
Keep the colour as a presentation layer and derive it from the exposure, for example red above a set share of the outcome's target, amber above a lower one. Nobody argues about a band that a formula produced. What you should not do is store the colour as the underlying record, because then the number that lets you rank and compare no longer exists.
How big should a RAID log be?
Small enough to review every open item at roadmap close in an hour. If it is bigger than that, the entry bar is too low: items with an exposure under a couple of percent of the outcome target are recorded and left alone rather than managed, and anything that is work with an owner and a date belongs in the backlog instead.
How to write release notes
Answered on How to write release notes, and rendered here in the same words.
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Who writes the release notes, product or engineering?
Whoever shipped the change drafts all four, with a model doing the first pass. Product approves the customer note and the executive one-pager, and whoever presses release signs the on-call entry. One drafter, two approvers, no committee. If the drafter is not on the rota, someone who is reads and countersigns the on-call entry before the release date is confirmed, because that is the artefact they will be woken up by.
What if the change is invisible to customers?
Then there is no customer note, and saying so is the correct output. Write no customer note required on the ticket so the absence is a recorded decision rather than an oversight. You still owe the on-call entry, because invisible changes are the ones that page people, and support still gets two lines if anything they can see in an admin tool, an export or a log has moved.
Can we auto-generate the notes from commit messages?
You can generate a draft, and you should. What you cannot do is publish it unread. Commit messages describe the work, not the change in the customer's day, and they carry service names and ticket IDs that have no business in a customer note. Treat generated text as a first pass to be verified against the evidence folder, and expect to rewrite the customer note almost entirely, because that reader sits furthest from the diff.
Is this proportionate for a hotfix at 2am?
Write the on-call entry first and four lines is enough: what changed, the flag, the rollback, the blast radius. The rest follows within one working day. Do not skip the executive line if the fix changes what the epic is expected to be worth, and do not skip the support pack if a customer might notice, because a hotfix support has not been briefed on generates the same tickets a planned release does, at a worse moment.
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