A few months ago, the team launched the all-new Rebit 2, a simplified personal and small business backup solution. While the production release was great, Rebit’s creators didn’t want it to be the destination. because Rebit was a product invented to keep unfolding its enhancements. In the next few months, the entire team consisting the developers to the designers including the quality assurance and marketing team, worked relentlessly to make it bigger and better. Although the previous release was successful, the team had their fingers crossed until the very minute it went live. This time, with the 2.3 release; the goal was to structure it. Hence, Rebit 2.3 was given structure not just with its features, but with its creation. With detailed planning came structure and with structure came a comfortable and confident launch– the launch of Rebit 2.3: A magic in the Rebit Family.
It was time for the Rebit team to exhibit their resilience through pronounced enhancements in the performance of both Rebit Endpoint Backup and Rebit Personal versions. They made sure this release is equipped with solid security to keep your files and folders away from ransomware attacks. Largely driven by your feedback, the Desktop App Interface has been improved to simplify user management. This is exactly why you should be upgrading to Rebit 2.3.
Rebit is continuously working on providing a high-quality backup solution by constantly considering your suggestions. In this blog, discover the intricacies of how your feedback has been valued in building the 2.3 version and what future releases have in store for you.
Identifying Concepts.
The Rebit 2.0 release was a roller-coaster ride since it was built from scratch. With 2.3, it was a matter of taking a step ahead in Rebit’s destination. But that was the tricky part. It demanded intense research from every team equally to reach the expected finesse. Items concerning data security were spotlighted by the development team during the penetration testing, leading to the need for better security features. Critical security measures that are essential and potential vulnerabilities in the codebase or dependencies were identified and notified to the Dev team. The development of the Sentinel portal– an online platform to manage Rebit, where users can buy, cancel, and renew Rebit subscriptions and see the backed-up data is taken care of by the Sentinel team. This time, they got busy spotting the scope for simplifying subscription and user management. With the identification of these impeccable features, the hopes were very high for this release with the team’s clear vision and with no hiccups.
Diagonal Flow of Communication.
Once what the release is going to consist of was identified, the process of execution speeded. The design team’s contributions to this release were mission-critical. Improvements in the user interface became a necessity largely driven by feedback from the users. Making a much simpler and cleaner UI was the key objective of the design team, and certain screens needed to be simplified to enhance the app’s user experience. The design team got straight to creating multiple wireframes to finally achieve perfection and promised that it’s only going to keep improving to a point where it gets more consistent throughout the application.
From the Quality Assurance team’s perspective, the automation test suite execution was improved vastly. They reduced the time for testing by automating all the pipelines which was another big achievement of this release. Within a very small period, all the issues were identified and rectified very quickly. The DevOps team is always the mainspring in actually giving the build, substantiating the releases and configurations were in place and the team did an amazing job of making sure everything happened on time.
Excited isn’t the word that would suffice how the marketing team felt when they learned about the new release. They sprung to action by mind-mapping the activities to make Rebit 2.3 reach a wider customer base. Overall, the release was fully refined– from PI planning to the execution including whatever dependencies the teams had on each other.
The Fibonacci Series of The Release.
Downtime. Bugs. Back and forth– these would be the difficult part of any release. Keeping them aside, the Rebit team had to get through the hard stuff to reach the finish line despite the plans and how comfortable they were with the release.
“The most difficult part from a design perspective was achieving consistency. It was challenging mainly because one thing the team tried to do from the beginning is bringing consistency to the app”, says Karan, UI/UX Lead.
Putting the processes together in an uncomplicated manner They had to streamline testing pipelines so that the configurations were devoid of conflicts and it was done through sanity testing. There were issues raised in the sanity testing. The team sat together to debug by going line by line over the code, to see what code changes can be made to fix the issues before Rebit 2.3 hit production. Along with these, the QA team came up with a few other probable issues after a series of automated testing. They immersed themselves in action finding the RCA for those issues and raising appropriate tickets.
“Assembling the process concerning the security controls, and making sure the changes are made across all environments and they’re tested properly before they go into production was one of the biggest challenges for the Security team”, Srigovind, Software Engineer, explained.
The Wrap-Up.
A week before the launch, the Rebit team was amped up and set to go because they knew they created a hit product. It was created, tried, tested, and ready to hit the floor. Every team was clear on what features they wanted to bring out in this release, and all of them were tested thoroughly. Though they were important features for the end user, they weren’t the most difficult or complex tasks to accomplish from a development and design perspective. It was a combination of simple tasks put together but very critical in terms of how it affects user experience.
The team couldn’t wait for the customers to get their hands on the initial launch of ransomware protection, the performance updates, and also the app interface improvements they had built in the Rebit SMB version. A blog post explaining the features and an article announcing the release went live on Rebit’s website; the launch email hit all Rebit users’ inboxes. The launch post was up across all social media platforms and every other marketing channel. And finally, as a payoff, the day ended without many complications with the team heading towards a more satisfying weekend.
What’s Next?
So yes, having a clear goal in mind and action without being too obsessed or anxious about the output would guarantee certainty in the launch of a product. Rebit 2.3 release stands as a classic example. Right after this successful launch, the team made a promise that they would work tirelessly to make Rebit into a product that would be the customer’s backup destiny. The team aims to keep the plan in place and deliver everything that’s there in the queue for future releases to hit the bull’s eye every time just like this release. Insider news has it that the next release is going to have more architectural changes to scale user growth. The security team is looking into General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance already. There would be a core functionality redesign for an elevated, more meaningful, and relevant user experience. The team is even looking at adding various enhancements to the ransomware protection feature to counter attacks that are silent and harder to notice where the name or extension of a file has not changed, but the file is encrypted and inaccessible. They are sure the users will see a rapid release cycle from them in the coming days. That calls for more tech-depth of Rebit. Let’s wait. Adios!
