Topic "Software Release Management"

For software to be truly open it must be released into the world for others to use and look at. The problem of doing so is well known to traditional Software Engineering: When and how should a release be done? How can we manage the process? Publish soon and often or rather sporadically? What are benefits and drawbacks of each approach and what are the arguments promoting them? How do we deal with the challenges of different plattforms?

This topic is also to discuss terminology (for instance: maintainer, feature-freeze, alpha and beta-versions, milestones, branches), processes and used tools.

Key Questions

• When and how should a release be done?
• How can we manage the process? Publish soon and often or rather sporadically?
• What are benefits and drawbacks of each approach and what are the arguments promoting them?
• How do we deal with the challenges of different plattforms?
• What are differences to closed source projects?

References

• Justin R. Erenkrantz, 03. Release Management Within Open Source Projects, in Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering, Portland, Oregon, May 2003. (PDF, 22KB)

Peer-References

• André van de Hoek and Alexander L. Wolf, 03. Software Release Management for Component-Based Software . John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003. (PDF, 394kb)
• van der Hoek, Hall, Heimbigner, Wolf, 97. Software Release Management . Proceedings of the 6th European Software Engineering Conference, Germany, Berlin, 1997.