Tips on Software Versioning

I'm going to break the rules of journalistic writing and start with this: 1.0, 1.0.3, 2.3.4, 4.5, 5.0, 5.0.8 and so on and so forth. Yes, you guessed it, I'm talking about software versioning and what it can do for you.

When the slightest modification is made to a program, a new version appears, as software versioning. First, let's see what the most common schemes of software versioning are:

• The most common is a scheme in which different major releases of the software receive a numerical identifier, which is usually expressed as three numbers, separated by periods. The most often used structure for numeric schemes is <major_revision.minor_revision> or <major_maintanance.minor_maintenance>. The first commercially released version of a software product has the version 1.0, with numbers below 1 being alpha or beta versions, for testing purposes, internal use or that are not stable enough to commercially release. Generally, the major number is changed when significant changes occur, the minor number when only minor features are modified and the revision number when minor bugs are fixed.
• Date versioning scheme, which uses the year followed by the month and the day of the release.
• Year of release, a versioning scheme that identifies the versions by year.
• Alphanumeric codes, like Macromedia Flash MX or Adobe Photoshop CS2.
• Roman numerals, like Apple's Mac OS X, representing version 10.
• Apple versioning scheme is based on a structure which specifies a one or two digit major version, a one-digit minor version, a one-digit revision version, a stage indicator and a one-byte pre-release version.
• Some producers use different schemes for different releases of their software, like Microsoft, which started by using the numeric versioning scheme, then by years and alphanumeric codes.

Usually independent software developers use version 1.0 as a milestone, indicating the program is complete, having all major features and is considered reliable enough for being release.

Versions are also used to describe the program's history. When a new version has a different architecture, sometimes being incompatible with previous releases, another version may be released to be compatible with both previous versions (for example, when Winamp released version 5, to be compatible with versions 2 and 3).

There are also the so called "marketing" version numbers. That is significantly changing version numbers with no apparent reason, other than to better market it or keep up with competitors. One example is when Microsoft Access jumped from version 2.0 to version 7.0, just to match the version number of Microsoft Word.

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Copyright © 2007, http://www.avangate.com all rights reserved. This article was written by Adriana Iordan, Web Marketing Manager at Avangate B.V. Avangate is a complete ecommerce provider for shareware sales incorporating an easy to use and secure online payment system plus additional software marketing services and sales tools.

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