Release types

In the many years that we develop inspectIT we realized that our biggest challenge is to release a new publicly available version. We saw that we always want to integrate just one more issue. 

Release types

Stable release

Stable releases are the primary releases built for customers. Major releases contain a set of features that directly benefit our customers. GA releases are also manually tested by explorative tests.

Preview release

Preview releases are intermediate releases during the development of a major release. Preview releases are released as soon as development thinks that enough improvement for customers have been made. That is releases are created if important bug fixes were or a set of new features are integrated. Preview releases enables us to provide important features or bug fixes without having to wait for the next GA release.

Snapshot release

Snapshot releases are triggered every week and provide the current stable branch of inspectIT development. 

Versioning and naming schema

Each GA version uses an x.y schema for an unique version description. We currently do not intend to increase the leading x value often. Criteria of x is how big the step between this version and the last version was. As a rough guideline we intend to increase x perhaps once every few years. The release number is increased with every run of the GA or the preview release. The buildnumber is an automatically created number that is increased for every build. It is used to allow us to uniquely identify our releases.

During the discussions (Patrice Bouillet, Stefan Siegl, Ivan Senic), Ivan mentioned an interesting point. For him the advantage of the current release process was that the features integrated in the beginning are already quite stable, as we are using them for quite some time already. We concluded that this is true, but no reason for not having more releases.