The Advantages and Challenges of AI-based Release Notes Generation

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We are on the verge of entering the AI age. A true game changer, Artificial Intelligence or AI is slated to revolutionize different facets of modern living. The software industry, in particular, will benefit immensely from the innovations offered by AI to automate routine processes. As chatbots like ChatGPT and other AI-based solutions gain traction, developers are now in a position to access intelligence in real-time.

One such routine process, which many software development companies follow, is the creation of release notes. Release notes are used to showcase a product's latest updates and reflect the ongoing hard work of the team to enhance the user experience. This documentation is used frequently as a communication channel to convey new features, enhancements, and other improvements to the user.

An efficient way to create release notes is to tap into the benefits of AI, where the process gets automated and requires minimum human intervention. Besides accelerating the process, AI tools can help in improving the content of release notes documents. While there are several benefits of AI-based release notes generation, there are some pitfalls too. For example, something like ChatGPT may expedite the process of release notes creation, but it is not 'situation aware' and cannot do the thinking and deep analysis for you.

Using AI to write release notes

Release notes require several hours of input from your team, and the task can get quite tedious and resource-intensive. Think of your team members' hours reviewing recent tickets, referencing published release notes, and creating a detailed account of the product changes.

What if AI tools could take over this tedious task and draft your release notes instantly? That's not just possible but preferable with tools such as ChatGPT and copy.ai that can tap into natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to scrutinize recent changes and automatically generate release notes.

Advantages of AI

AI potentially can offer many benefits, such as consistency, speed, and customization. Here's a snapshot of the advantages of using AI for release notes generation:

Integration of information:  The data and information generated daily in an organization could be scattered in different places, such as emails, cloud storage, and files. AI tools can help you integrate this information that forms the basis of generating release notes.

Smart research: AI tools usually have access to a mountain of information and that helps with several research tasks. This enables the AI tool to digest all the relevant data & come up with something that is peculiar to your software product. The intelligent research capabilities of AI applications also lay the groundwork for generating release notes.

Efficiency in data-oriented tasks: Any software company developing apps or other products will regularly generate huge volumes of data. Collating and analyzing this data can overwhelm your team, unless there are specialised departments to take care of this. On the other hand, AI applications can swiftly process the data and automatically turn them into release notes.

Brand customization:  Several AI applications offer templates, themes, tones customisation for presenting release notes under the umbrella of your brand. This can help you achieve consistency in design and formatting to create a unified and strong brand image.

Drawbacks of AI

Like it or not, Artificial intelligence is not without its pitfalls. Chatbots like ChatGPT may expedite time-consuming processes, but their contextual awareness could be limited. Before completely delegating the generation of release notes to AI apps, look out for these limitations:

Human intervention required: AI tools add speed and even value to documentation, but they can't replace human intelligence. They function by consuming training data, which could be faulty or erroneous. Hence the release notes generated may lack accuracy and consistency, and you will have to intervene to ensure precision.

Lack of multiple perspectives: A chatbot or AI application offers a limited view as its suggestions are derived from existing data. It can mistake a frequent pattern as a best practice instead of providing multiple options.

Risk of inaccuracy: We are still a long way from AI tools becoming accurate. Thus there is always the risk of generating incorrect information in your release notes. With limited perspective, you run the risk of creating repetitive and even incorrect release notes. Human intervention is necessary for preventing these inaccuracies being communicated to different stakeholders.

Tool and not a replacement

Artificial intelligence has taken significant strides since the advent of assistants like Siri and Alexa, which millions have adopted. Recent innovations like ChatGPT are a boon for repetitive tasks like creating release notes and free up valuable time to carry out more complex and ambitious undertakings. Such chatbots may be more intelligent, yet they have limitations while performing complex tasks. They can only assist humans and not replace them fully for the stated tasks.

AI presents a never before efficiency and functionality for the software industry, yet an ethical debate also surrounds it. These tools are only as smart as the training data they tackle, and this data may include a degree of learning bias and human prejudice. The next generation of AI tools must be created factoring in these issues to help elevate the tedious and resource-driven task of generating release notes to an effortless and efficient one.

Take a look at my other related article, Can ChatGPT write my release notes?