XTRF Release Procedures

    Content

    Definitions

    Major (breaking) release (upgrade) is announced to XTRF customers community several months in advance and contains brand new features and major functional improvements, as well as removal of discontinued features. Major release is addressed at first position of the version numbering scheme: x.y.z. e.g. 6.0.0, 7.0.0.

    Minor (feature) release (update) contains minor functional improvements and bug fixes. No feature can be removed at this occasion, but some features can be announced as deprecated. If the release includes any changes to API or customizations, they are guaranteed to be backward-compatible. Minor release is addressed at the second position of the version numbering scheme: x.y.z. e.g. 7.2.0, 8.2.0.

    Patch (fix) release (update) contains bug fixes only. Patch release is addressed at the third position of the version numbering scheme: x.y.z. e.g. 7.0.12, 7.2.1.

    Release process key statements

    1. Every release, be it major, minor or patch, is considered public and delivers a set of features and/or fixes with highest reliability and stability standards.

    2. Every release may be preceded by a beta version at our discretion. Beta is meant solely for testing purposes and should not be used in production environments.

    3. Announcement of a new major release sets an end date for support of the previous major version to at least 6 months from that time point. Such an older major version is moved to the maintenance phase. During maintenance phase fixes to critical bugs are delivered.

    4. Any critical bug fixes or quality improvements delivered during the maintenance phase do not change functional behavior and scope of the features. Fixes are delivered as updates and can be used under conditions of signed customer support policy.

    5. Every upgrade can result in various changes in: functionalities, features’ scope (discontinuing some and adding other ones), templates and system notifications, database migrations, UI and system compatibility. The version release notes are available at a dedicated XTRF Platform Release Notes page (see reference below).

    6. XTRF reserves the right to change the time, frequency and policy of software delivery to respond to market and industry demands.

       

     

    Continuous Delivery

    Continuous Delivery is a software development practice where software is built in such a way that it can be released to production at any time. It is one of the agile principles XTRF is committed to. The principal benefits of Continuous Delivery are:

    • Reduced Deployment Risk ‒ deploying smaller changes results in less things to go wrong and–should a problem appear–it is easier to fix.

    • Believable Progress ‒ smaller chunks of work can be deployed into a production (or production-like) environment.

    • User Feedback ‒ getting working software in front of real users quick to shorten the feedback-to-development loop.

     

    Software Stability

    All XTRF official releases: major, minor and patch are subject to a tight quality control process that guarantees all business scenarios defined as Critical Business Operations (see reference below) work correctly.

     

    Referred Documents