Program Management for Open Source Projects

Set the Phases

Problem: You need to decide what level of support to provide.

The first thing that comes to mind when you think of a “life cycle” is probably a set of phases. Humans start out as infants and then become toddlers. Eventually, they turn into teenagers and adults. Like humans, software also goes through phases. In each phase, a different level of support is required, and there are different expectations. Let’s not abuse the metaphor by trying to directly map software to humans, but the first question to ask when setting the life cycle is “what phases do we have?”

In the remainder of this section, we’ll look at different phases you might include in your release life cycle. Most of them are optional. In fact, the simplest model is ...