This article provides an introduction to the Lumary CM release process and explains what you can expect and what you can do to help.
The Lumary release process aims to provide a continuous and stable cycle of new features and improvements. We encourage you to get involved and help us to help you avoid issues when we apply the release to your production environment.
The key step of the process for customers is testing. The best time to test is immediately after we deploy the release into your sandbox environment. This will help ensure a smooth transition when we update your production environment.
This article explains the:
- main stages of the release process
- benefits of testing
- issues that Lumary will support during a release, and
- issues that are out of scope during a release.
Release process overview
There are five main stages to the release process. They are:
- planning new features and improvements, where Lumary works with internal and external stakeholders to identify which features and improvements to include
- developing and testing updates, where we develop and test new features and improvements
- deploying to sandboxes, where we install the release in customer sandboxes for customer testing
- reviewing and resolving issues, where we work through the issues raised from sandbox testing, and
- updating production environments, where we install the release in customer production environments.
Find out more about what happens at each stage of the release cycle.
The release process is supported by a live status page. Find out about the status of our next release.
Benefits of sandbox testing
Our QA team applies rigorous testing to make sure that new features and improvements work alongside existing Lumary functionality. However, just as your business is unique, your production environment and processes may be slightly different than a baseline Lumary implementation. This is why we deploy a release to sandboxes prior to the full production release. It’s your opportunity to make sure that the improvements that we’ve made don’t conflict with your internal processes.
While we allow a generous testing window, we encourage you to start as early as possible. This helps ensure we have enough time to resolve relevant issues caused by the release.
Failing to test a release before it’s applied to your production environment may expose your live data to issues that impact on your business processes and/or claims.
Testing new features and improvements in your sandbox also gives you the opportunity to try them out without impacting your live data. While we do our best to provide clear instructions around changes to functionality, sometimes it’s easier to understand if you give it a go yourself.
Release issues we’ll aim to resolve
During the release cycle, we encourage you to focus on issues relevant to the release. While you may notice areas where we can improve, your main aim should be to make sure that everything still works as expected when you apply your usual business processes.
The types of issues we’ll aim to resolve during a release include problems caused by conflicts with:
- existing Lumary functionality, or
- supported Lumary partner applications, such as Skedulo, easyemployer, MYOB, Xero or Formstack.
Find out more about raising a release issue.
Out of scope issues
Customisations will be a source of out of scope issues during the release process. Customisations are changes that have been made to a customer's production environment, either by a third party or through the Lumary Delivery Team. The intellectual property and responsibility for maintaining these changes is held by the customer once the warranty period has lapsed.
During a release, Lumary does not support issues caused by customisations:
- developed by a third party, or
- where Lumary’s warranty of support has expired.
If work is required to repair customised functionality, it:
- will be assessed as a separate project
- may incur a cost, and
- will not be part of the release process timeline.
When you’re testing in your sandbox, you may also think of new features or improvements that could benefit the system. While your suggestions are welcome, please be aware that they will not be considered during a release. Our priority at this time is to make sure that the system is stable for all of our customers. You may provide your ideas as a feature request for consideration in future releases.