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    Public process guide
    Beta Release Process

    How Copify handles beta updates without treating your stores like a test lab.

    Beta releases still need to move fast, but they should not put merchant data, existing sync pipelines, or recovery options at unnecessary risk. This guide explains how we prepare, validate, roll out, communicate, and support beta updates.

    What you can expect

    Staged rollout for higher-risk changes

    Clear website changelog and product messaging

    Defined stop conditions and recovery paths

    Support context prepared before riskier releases ship

    Core commitments

    The principles behind every beta release.

    Clear change visibility

    Every beta update gets a customer-safe summary so you can see what changed, why it matters, and whether any action is needed.

    Staged, not rushed

    We prefer ring-based rollout over broad release blasts, especially when an update can affect live sync behaviour.

    Recovery first

    If an update touches sync logic, scheduling, rollback, backups, auth, or billing, we prepare the recovery path before rollout.

    Support-ready releases

    Support receives a plain-English brief for medium and high-risk releases so merchant questions can be handled fast.

    Release packet

    What we prepare before a release moves.

    Required

    Detailed release notes

    A full summary of scope, important changes, risk areas, and rollback context.

    Required

    Website changelog update

    A merchant-facing summary that explains what changed, who benefits, and whether any action is required.

    Required

    In-app announcement copy

    Short release messaging prepared for product surfaces such as banners, cards, or future what's-new feeds.

    Required

    Rollback plan

    A defined stop condition, owner, and recovery path for releases that could affect live data or sync behaviour.

    Required

    Support brief

    Expected questions, workarounds, affected surfaces, and the escalation path to engineering.

    Risk tiers

    We adjust the process to the level of risk.

    Tier
    Typical changes
    Required gates
    Low
    Copy updates, UI polish, and non-destructive docs or settings improvements.
    Normal testing and changelog coverage.
    Medium
    New settings, reporting, notifications, safe schema additions, or non-critical routes.
    Targeted regression, staged rollout, and a support brief.
    High
    Sync engine changes, field rules, scheduler behaviour, backups, rollback, migrations touching live data, auth, billing, or Shopify API changes.
    Live regression coverage, staged rollout, explicit rollback ownership, monitoring, and pre-written customer communications.

    When a release is hard to classify, we treat it as high risk.

    Standard flow

    The release path we follow from review to rollout.

    01

    Classify the change

    We review what surfaces are affected, whether writes could behave differently, and whether existing schedules, pipelines, or webhooks could change.

    02

    Prepare the release packet

    We align release notes, changelog messaging, support guidance, and rollback planning before deployment starts.

    03

    Run validation

    Every release goes through automated checks, targeted regression, and extra live-style validation when sync, rollback, backups, or entity transforms are involved.

    04

    Apply safety gates

    For medium and high-risk releases we confirm recovery paths, ensure snapshots or backups exist, and choose a lower-risk rollout window.

    05

    Deploy in rings

    We progress from internal and demo coverage to a small beta cohort before broader rollout, rather than changing every merchant at once.

    06

    Communicate after validation

    Once the release is live and confirmed healthy, we publish the website changelog, product messaging, and support brief in a consistent order.

    Safety rails

    These protections are release gates, not marketing extras.

    Change detection to avoid unnecessary rewrites of unchanged entities

    Pre-sync snapshots for narrower rollback paths when something goes wrong

    Backup creation and restore for broader recovery scenarios

    Drift checks and comparison tooling to spot divergence early

    Sync logs and notification channels to surface failures quickly

    Release communications

    We communicate after the release is validated.

    Deploy and validate first

    Publish the website changelog

    Publish in-product announcement copy when relevant

    Send the support brief

    Add pre-release heads-up messaging for higher-impact behavioural changes

    Stop conditions

    When we pause rollout

    Unexpected repeat sync failures after release

    Spikes in changed or overwritten records that do not match expectations

    Missing snapshots before destination writes

    Rollback or restore failures in the impacted area

    Drift or data-propagation issues reported by merchants

    Recovery path

    How we recover if a release misbehaves

    01

    Pause the rollout and isolate the affected stores or pipelines.

    02

    Use the smallest safe recovery path first, starting from narrow rollback options before broader restore actions.

    03

    Switch to broader backup restore only when the issue reaches beyond a single entity or sync session.

    04

    Publish customer and support updates if merchant data has been affected.

    Support handling

    What support has ready, and what helps us help you faster.

    Prepared before release

    A plain-English summary of the release

    The affected product surfaces

    Known limitations or temporary workarounds

    Exact escalation path into engineering

    Helpful details if you report an issue

    Source store and destination store

    Pipeline or flow involved

    Entity type affected

    Approximate time the issue first appeared

    Whether the issue came from a manual sync, scheduled sync, webhook sync, or deployment

    Need help now?

    Release questions should not wait until a bad sync.

    If you want clarification on a changelog item, rollout timing, or behaviour after an update, contact the Copify team and we will help you assess the impact.

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