5.13 Document Future Updates and Evolutions

Products or services are updated regularly. Ensure that additions, changes, deprecations, removals, fixes, or security patches are documented in an easy-to-read document with details that showcase how such changes affect the visitor (or how they can take advantage of new features).

Criteria

Feature Changes: Adding, updating, or removing features are considered where appropriate to the user-experience of the product or service.

Impact

Low

Effort

Low

Benefits

Environmental:
Maintaining an intuitive, lightweight user-experience while adding new features or updating software reduces frustration, churn, and the energy visitors expend when the interface doesn’t perform in ways visitors expect.
Security:
Websites and applications that maintain an evergreen status often have fewer issues due to a strong release cycle which not only makes necessary changes but also keeps visitors informed, maintaining transparency.
Performance:
Maintaining an optimized user-experience that is regularly kept current using best practices also implies that pages and assets load quickly in ways visitors expect.
Economic:
Products and services which are left to become outdated may have higher costs to restart the project from scratch and resurrect; whereas small regular updates have a lesser overhead in terms of time commitments from development scheduling and the impact on potential lost consumers.

GRI

materials: Low
energy: Low
water: Low
emissions: Low

Example

Code:

# Changelog - Website

## [Unreleased]
- N/A

## 1.0.0 - YYYY-MM-DD
### Added
- Content.

## [Guide]
- Added: New features.
- Changed: Altered functionality.
- Deprecated: Disappearing features.
- Removed: Eliminated features.
- Fixed: Bugs patched.
- Security: Solved vulnerabilities.

Keep A Changelog.

Resources

View the Guideline