Release It!, 2nd Edition

Wrapping Up

Like many places where our software intersects with the external environment, versioning is inherently messy. It will always remain a complex topic. I recommend a utilitarian philosophy. The net suffering in your organization is minimized if everyone thinks globally and acts locally. The alternative is an entire organization slowly grinding to a halt as every individual release gets tied down waiting for synchronized upgrades of its clients.

In this chapter, we’ve seen how to handle our versions to aid others and how to defend ourselves against version changes in our consumers and providers. Next we look at the operations side of the equation—namely, how to build transparency into our systems and how to adapt when transparency ...