VoipNow 3.5.0 GA will be released on Monday, 20 Apr 2015. It has been a very long ride for our most impressive release yet. We are very proud of it:

• more than 2,000 JIRA issues solved (improvements, bugs, general tasks)
• over 10k commits in the code base
• over 40k hours of work

You will get a lot more details on Monday about the technical stuff. Meanwhile, you can get hot news from @VoipNowUpdates on Twitter.

But until then, I want to let you know about a product management change that we will introduce together with VoipNow 3.5.0 and which affects you in a positive way. Being a management change, it will not reach the release notes.

A single product branch, frequent releases

Before VoipNow 3.5.0, we maintained two product branches – a stable version and a development version. On the stable version we had frequent updates, most issues solved being bugs or minor improvements. The development branch always got the major improvements and the release cycle was much longer. We’ve been using this model since the first version of VoipNow, but we don’t consider it appropriate anymore. That’s why we’re making some important changes:

• We will maintain only one product branch.
• There will be a release every month. Such a release will contain both bug fixes and improvements.

The version nomenclature will change its meaning. On every release we will jump the version with 0.1.0 (for example, the next version after 3.5.0 will be 3.6.0, then 3.7.0 and so on). It’s not necessary for you to upgrade every month, but it will be a good idea to follow as closely as possible.

Smoother upgrades

Due to the more incremental release policy, it will be much easier to follow the release notes and there will be fewer risks with every upgrade. We might as well release patch versions – these will be made available only in order to fix critical regressions or security issues. Such intermediary versions can be recognized easily because the last digit of the version will be different to zero (for example 3.5.1 is the first patch for 3.5.0). With such a short release cycle, it will be uncommon / undesired to have more than one patch for a release, but of course that it might happen.

Get updates on Twitter

We’re confident that you’ll enjoy the benefits of this more dynamic release schedule and we invite you again to follow @VoipNowUpdates on Twitter. This Twitter account is managed by VoipNow Product Management team and we’re going to use it not only to announce release dates, but also new features in advance. Enjoy!