Decide How Many
Problem: You need to decide how many parallel releases to support.
The first question you ask yourself when determining a release life cycle isn’t “how long?” but “how many?” The simplest form of a release life cycle is a single continuous stream, updated repeatedly forever (or until you abandon the project). You publish a release and people use it until the next release comes out.
This is simple because the only supported version is the latest version. But it also requires that upgrades are trivial for users to perform and never fail or change existing behavior. And it locks developers into decisions that were made early on. You can do a total rewrite and drop that into place, but if it changes existing behavior, you’ll alienate ...
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