‘Cumulative Patching’ Support Process

Since January 2020, Basis Technologies’ support team has been working to a new Cumulative Patching process for delivering patch fixes to customers.

This Cumulative Patching means that when a new bug is fixed for a customer after the release of ActiveControl 9.20, an interim patch release (e.g. AC 9.20.1) is created by Basis Technologies. If a second fix is then required for a second customer, then a new interim patch release AC9.20.2 is created that includes this second fix plus also the fix for the first customer contained within AC9.20.1. This means that a customer requiring a fix will always be given a cumulative patch fix containing all fixes delivered by Basis Technologies for their version since the last main release of ActiveControl.

This new Patching process was introduced as Basis Technologies were increasingly encountering instances of different customers (both new customers plus existing customers that had upgraded to the latest release) reporting the same bug issues. By introducing this interim patching process, we believe it will largely avoid this inefficiency – and even more importantly, mean that Basis Technologies will in many cases already have an available fix that can be quickly provided to the customer.

As part of this Cumulative Patching Process, Change Notes are created by Basis Technologies for every appropriate change or fix created for ActiveControl. By doing this, Basis Technologies aim to improve the visibility of changes within our customer base versus what was previously possible within our long-standing Release Notes process. In addition, automated regression testing has also been introduced by Basis Technologies as part of the Web Platform UI and is now executed as part of the ActiveControl Development and Quality Assurance process. Basis Technologies expect this to have a positive impact on the stability of both Cumulative Patches and the ongoing new releases of ActiveControl, as well as potentially increasing the frequency of new ActiveControl releases.