Change can be a good thing!

How familiar does this sound: You've found a fantastic software package that you love - it saves you time, keeps you organized, and even makes formerly mundane tasks fun. Then they release a new version - and everything's different. They've moved all the menu options, the settings have completely changed, and what used to take 5 minutes now takes 30 minutes of tedious searching through menus and configuration settings for what you need.

Many people are naturally resistant to change, but even technophiles among us can sometimes be heard saying "the last version was WAY better". At Tailwind, we know that we've caused some of you to say this about CMS in the past, and we want you to know that we've been listening.

In the past year, Tailwind has made a number of policy changes to ensure that new versions of CMS are as bug-free as possible, and do not change existing functionality. Here's what we've done:

1. Rigorous Pre-Release Testing: We now have dedicated testing staff who check all candidate builds before they are released to customers. Changes and new features are the focus of this testing process, but all standard functionality is also tested extensively. The build is not released unless they sign off on it.
2. Automated Testing: We are in the process of separating business logic code from the user-interface in CMS. This has a number of benefits for customers, including the fact that we can create automated testing functions for critical functionality within CMS. Once these automated "unit tests" are in place, all new builds of CMS will need to pass these tests (in addition to the manual tests done by our staff) before being released to customers.
3. Leaving Current Functionality As-Is: If we feel that certain functionality should be changed to improve the way it works, we create a system configuration flag which defaults the system to the old functionality. A recent example of this is the "Dispatch: Allocate dispatch revenue based on mileage only" setting. When enabled, CMS uses a much more intuitive algorithm based on mileage only for determining how much revenue should be displayed when multiple trucks or carriers are moving a single load. However, to prevent your dispatch revenue figures from suddenly changing unexpectedly, we made this a configuration flag. Check your configuration settings regularly after updates to look for new settings. HINT: Any settings that are set to values other than what we recommend will be bold in your system configuration.
4. Change Notification: Whenever a stable build is released, if it contains a bugfix or feature your company requested, we'll send you an email to let you know that the new version is available for download from the customer portal. Furthermore, you can now click on What's New to see a complete list of all changes between your current version of CMS, and the new version.
   

The result of all of these changes is that Tailwind is now releasing less frequent, higher quality builds. We think this is a good thing, and we hope these changes make the upgrade process a lot less stressful.