Develop Version Numbering for an Application

Question

Firstly, I think this forum is not appropriate for my question, so if it is in wrong place, kindly forgive and place wherever appropriate. I didn\'t find proper forum for my que

Answer 1

I think - and this comes from my experience, not just an idea - that you should use 4 part version numbering - very much along the lines of @Randolf. However I would make a different definition of the parts and the versioning.

major - this should be incremented when the version is a new build, is not compatible with previous versions without an upgrade process, or when the build/development platform changes ( so moving from .net 2.0 to .net 4.0 would count.

minor - this should be incremented when the data structures underlying your application change ( whether this is a db or not ). This means that a data build or update will be needed, which for clients indicates the level of work that may be needed for an upgrade.

build - this should always be incremented whenever a full production build is made, as a release candidate.

revision - this should be updated for every build, and used for bug fixes on a release candidate.

This means that you can identify with the version number exactly which changes and fixes are in that release, which is crucial for support.

Manual or automatic - this route would imply a manual update, and this is important to enable you to identify what a release contains.

Release and development version numbers should generally be the same, becasue the version number should only be incremented when a build for potential release is made. Having said that, you should also make sure that you can do development on any supported version, which may be lower than current development version, if a new release is in testing.