Release cycle

Freeplane will follow a testing,tracking and release policy as described below.

Test releases

Test releases will be uploaded first to a testing area and later will be released on sourceforge after one or more tester confirms that no major bugs have been introduced in the test version.

Bug handling

FreePlane uses Mantis BT as bug tracker (https://sourceforge.net/apps/mantisbt/freeplane). Bugs should be set to resolved once the developer has fixed it and checked-in the changes in the version tool. The bug should be kept open to allow testers to alert the developers of a recurrence. The bugs can be closed in RC phase.

Current and next release stages

• Beta : Freeplane is currently in beta stage.

• Release candidate: Freeplane will move to release candidate stage when no bugs have been reported for 2 weeks. Perhaps we should have a "bug crush" period. Each RC should last no longer than a month. Hopefully few bug reports will be coming in at this point.

• Stable: Freeplane should aim to be stable after no more than three RCs as long as no major bugs are reported in the release. We should seek users feedbacks for quality assurance.

Release Cycle

Freeplane's release cycle is time boxed at 6 months, and meant to allow for 2 stable releases per year (but much more unstable releases ;-) ).

As shown above, the release cycle of Freeplane consists of 4 phases:

Alpha 

3 months of "wild" development on MAIN/HEAD/trunk (CVS resp. SVN talk)

⇒ Branch the next release e.g. Branch_1.0.x - developers can continue to bring in new features on MAIN/HEAD/trunk.

Beta 

2 months of bug fixing releases on Branch_1.0.x - that would be Beta releases.

⇒ Create RC1 (Release Candidate) - call for translations, 3rd party plugins and packaging.

Release Candidate (RC) 

1 month of integration of translations + critical bug fixing (3rd party plugins and packaging as well, but final packaging can only happen after final release so we can only make sure that it all happen in a limited timeframe).

⇒ Create Final release, e.g. 1.1.0.

Stable 

new bug fixing / stable releases can be done as required, called 1.1.1, 1.1.2...

⇒ Restart the cycle e.g. for 1.2.x

Another way to show the approach is the following 3 pictures. The blue line turns clockwise while we progress through a release cycle; what is right of the line (in Green) is allowed to be done, what is left of the line (in Red) isn't. This means that everything is allowed during Alpha phase, that in Beta we should avoid major rewrite unless it's needed to fix a critical bug, and, as we come to RC, almost nothing is allowed but to fix critical bugs.

Side note

the line progresses continuously, it's not a sudden jump, e.g. during beta, we implement always less new things, even if they're easy to do, and fix always more bug, thus regularly stabilizing the code basis.