Welcome to the Onshape forum! Ask questions and join in the discussions about everything Onshape.
First time visiting? Here are some places to start:- Looking for a certain topic? Check out the categories filter or use Search (upper right).
- Need support? Ask a question to our Community Support category.
- Please submit support tickets for bugs but you can request improvements in the Product Feedback category.
- Be respectful, on topic and if you see a problem, Flag it.
If you would like to contact our Community Manager personally, feel free to send a private message or an email.
Investing in Onshape's Foundation: Focus on Stability and Performance for the Next Two Releases
Vajrang_Parvate
Member, Onshape Employees Posts: 11 
Hello Onshape Community,
We have an important update about our upcoming releases. As you know, we've been committed to delivering new features and improvements every three weeks, and we greatly appreciate your enthusiasm and feedback. In just the past 6 or so months, we have released:
- Onshape AI Advisor
- Onshape Government for ITAR/EAR needs
- CAM Studio
- Powerful core modeling enhancements such as: constrained surfaces, routing curve, edit curve, sketch constraints manager, curve approximation, loft/boundary surface improvements, flatten surfaces, many sheet metal enhancements, ...
- FeatureScript performance and usability enhancements to make it easier and faster to create custom features
- A completely re-architected Render Studio, and many workflow improvements following the re-architecture
- A great leap forward in Drawings: Constrained sketching, support for many new types of drawing views, automatic centermarks, datum attachments, inspection tables, …
- Many UX and quality of life improvements: universal keyboard shortcuts, dark mode, cosmetic threads, reference repair, config parameter visibility, Product Structure View, …
- Product areas like Data and Release Management, and Enterprise Analytics
- And of course, many performance improvements in multiple areas of the product
We've also been listening closely to your feedback regarding performance, robustness, and addressing issues. To ensure Onshape continues to be a stable and reliable platform for your critical design work, we've made the strategic decision to dedicate the next two releases entirely to addressing technical debt and improving the overall user experience.
What does this mean?
Over the next two Onshape releases, we will be turning our attention to:
- Addressing reported issues: prioritizing those that cause the most significant disruptions to your workflows
- Architectural improvements: making core changes in several areas that will enable us to deliver even more powerful and innovative features in future releases
- Technical Debt: Look closer at areas of the product that are in need of refactoring and can benefit internal workflows for teams such as QA, Support, Documentation and Technical Operations
Why are we doing this?
We believe that investing in Onshape's foundation is essential for its long-term health and your continued success. By addressing these underlying areas, we're not just fixing user-reported issues; we're strengthening the core of Onshape to create a more stable and efficient platform that will empower you to design with greater confidence.
What to expect in the upcoming releases:
- A somewhat leaner list of feature enhancements (as listed in the What’s New posts)
- But a longer changelog that will list all the details highlighting the specific issues and performance improvements implemented
- We'll share selected "behind-the-scenes" technical updates to give you insight into the work done
We understand that you may be eager for new features, and we want to assure you that this is a temporary shift in focus. We are committed to returning to our regular cadence of feature releases after these two foundational releases.
We value your feedback and appreciate your understanding as we work to make Onshape even better and thank you for being part of the Onshape community.
Vajrang Parvate
SVP, Onshape Product and R&D
Comments
CAD Engineering Manager
More companies need to do this! This reminds me of a certain "other" CAD company where some users where advocating for one year with zero new features and just bug fixes instead but it never happened…
Looking forward to "behind the scenes" peek as well!
If this paves the way for some powerful configuration logic controls (suppression by expression, between tables etc. ) we are happy…
I’m sure that these will be the best updates
Excellent shift !!!
Excellent… as Eric has said other companies would benefit greatly from this approach.
This is most encouraging that the foundation of Onshape is being given this attention, thank you
In the long term, it is usually a good idea to get the base straight first.
This is why Onshape is the new standard in CAD.
Twitter: @BryanLAGdesign
Very good decision! Like @bryan_lagrange says, this is why you are the best.
Reminds me of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard
@Vajrang_Parvate Our team at Trek is very excited for this, excited for more details!!
Thanks for the heads up @Vajrang_Parvate, I appreciate all that the Onshape team does for us!
2 whole releases for technical debt sounds amazing.
I'm excited to see a release notes like:
Custom FeatureScript and Onshape Integrated Applications
I waited a long time for an announcement like this.
I think any power user will prefer less bells and whistles and much more reliability.
This is great, and I hope OS will do this more often.
🙏
Absolutely the right move. As much as we all love shiny new features, none of that matters if the foundation isn’t solid. Prioritising performance and reliability is what keeps long-term users happy — something I’ve seen firsthand in crypto as well. In that space, the most effective platforms don’t just chase trends, they focus on their core community. That niche audience — passionate, clued-in — makes all the difference. If you're curious how that looks in action, take a look at readfi.io.
When you say architectural improvements for more powerful features, will that be on the internal engine side of things or on the open source featurescript side of things?
I'm imagining something like the improvements made to the hole tool last year which expanded capabilities but also deprecated useful functionality which hasn't returned to the feature yet. Blind-in-last is still missed by my team.
The work we're doing is not specific to FeatureScript, but system-wide in areas that need some stabilization after the number of large features we shipped in the past 6 or so months.
Yes. This is a great idea. Any product needs investment into technical debt and underlying systems/processes. Very important work.
Will you also focus on standardizing user inputs and desired outputs across various features? For example, implementing a consistent "hit Enter/Esc to confirm and close" instead of requiring users to hover over a green checkmark to confirm or using Esc to confirm. The UX varies significantly from feature to feature and between 3D and 2D environments.
I've noticed this as well with sketching spline vs bezier. Spline you have to right click and confirm. to finish it. and bezier you have to press the escape key to finish it. if you right click and click escape bezier it erases what you just did
This sounds fantastic. And what an excellent example of good communication with the Onshape community. Ty for the update!
Learn more about the Gospel of Christ ( Here )
CADSharp - We make custom features and integrated Onshape apps! Learn How to FeatureScript Here 🔴
Mad respect! I imagine this is the kind of stand that a dev team always wishes their leaders would take, but few do. And since I plan to be using Onshape for another few decades or so I'm grateful for this long view too.
The Onsherpa | Reach peak Onshape productivity
www.theonsherpa.com
This is very good news.
An idea for the suggestion box: Schedule every nth release as a "no new features" maintenance release to do cleanups, clear up technical debt, etc, etc. This gives the software engineers the opportunity to keep the weeding under control, it helps them plan. Often the people who make the decisions about what goes into new versions have no visibility whatsoever about the state of the weeds - until it gets to a stage where customers start complaining - and by then it's a bit late. It gives the education teams a reprieve and they can invest time to clean up training and reference assets.
Bring on the chaos management
Much needed! Very much needed! I would go as far as to say, new features only every 3 updates and always have two update interval dedicated only to bug fixes and general improvements to existing functionality. I know I probably speak for myself but, new stuff every three weeks just seems unneeded and impractical. Critical fixes already get fixed with micro system updates mid update term so I really feel like the three week feature update interval is mildly ridiculous. I'm sure some marketing team somewhere has historical data that is strongly disagreeing but… Even if the new features were every 9 weeks, I still think that's an interval of introducing new stuff that is better than anything else your going to be getting in the other big cad systems. 😉
Hi Shawn,
The 3 week cadence is not a marketing driven cycle at all - if anything, the rapid releases makes it more difficult for our Marketing team to keep up and stay on top of what we're releasing.
The 3 weeks release cadence is more like a clock cycle we operate on. The analog is having a small train scheduled every 5 mins vs. a large train leaving every 6 hours. The overhead required to try and get a large number of passengers (i.e. code changes for features) on board the 6-hour train is way more than what is needed for the 5-min train.
If a feature doesn't make it in release n, no big deal; we have release (n+1) in 3 weeks. But if a feature would miss the 9-week cadence (or 1 year cadence like some other CAD systems), then it gets pushed out a lot longer and the feature is just sitting there, rather than getting used by customers and giving us more rapid feedback.
This gives all the teams working on multiple large projects in parallel an opportunity to catch the next release train much quicker.
This effect is amplified even more for bug fixes - almost all bug fixes are made in the "next release" code branch. A shorter clock cycle of releases means those bug fixes get released a lot sooner and iterated upon. Completely removes the need for intermediate "service packs".
@Vajrang_Parvate That was some great insight and a wonderfully visual explanation into the systems development structure. Thanks!
I would highly recommend Donald G. Reinertsen's book "The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development". Lean/agile thinking started with manufacturing but more recently took strong hold in software development. This book makes the point that hardware development should focus on reducing the cost of delay and batch sizes. Those two key principles drive making releases often and not waiting until you have a whole bunch of them in one big batch.
When you see those principles laid out in so many examples in the book, it helps connect what designers, mechanical engineers and software developers do and how to improve the process in hardware.