Release Plan

How We’re Going To Do It

All software projects go through several well established phases. We’re now well past most of them with Zavala 1.0, so I’m going to focus on the final phase: Implementation. This is where we take a piece of built software and try to get it into the users hands. This is how we’ll do it.

Developer Releases

These releases are to let people have an early look at the app. This is useful to make sure the project isn’t completely off course. These builds are considered very risky and you should expect things like data loss while using them.

We’ve been putting these out for many months now. They are distributed through a download on GitHub for the Mac version and TestFlight for the iOS version.

Alpha Releases

We now have the first Alpha build out. You can also get them via GitHub download or TestFlight.

Alpha builds are feature complete and have no known bugs. There most certainly are bugs in the code! At this stage the application hasn’t been tested well enough to have found all the bugs. Features shouldn’t be added after this point, but may be if they are absolutely critical the final version.

These builds are also considered risky, but not nearly so much as the Developer Releases. You can use them to do work, but you should back up your data. For Zavala, it is recommended you back up anything you find important by exporting it as an OPML file.

Beta Releases

The Beta builds will be pretty well tested. By this point we will probably still be finding bugs, but they should be few and far between. Features are frozen at this point and now new ones will be added.

You should be able to use these builds for real work as long as you are willing to work around problems. OPML backups of important information should still be made.

Production Release

This is when we have made it as good as we’re going to make it. There shouldn’t be any bugs if at all possible. Certainly no bugs that are critical to the functioning of the application. If we do ship with any cosmetic bugs, they will be addressed in a follow up minor release.

The big thing about this release is that the Mac Application will only be available through the Mac App store. We won’t be distributing the stand alone version. There are some technical difficulties with distributing this kind of app outside the App store, so we are just going to avoid them all together.

Let’s do this!

I hope you willing to get on the release train and help out. You don’t need any technical knowledge to help make this project something great. All you have to do is use Zavala and tell us what you like and don’t like about it.