Page History

Scope

• Feature Life Cycle Management includes that planned features are subject to a Development Cycle:
  • having passed the Planning Cycle new features can be assigned a release for development.
  • after releasing within the Development Cycle a feature might be dropped from future releases within a Deprecation Cycle.
• This article describes
  • the policy for developing features. 
  • the mapping to the respective status in the Change Management System.
• Further resources for life cycle management
• Ongoing development means that features may eventually be replaced by alternative functions - i.e. they become deprecated. 
• See 
  • for the overall Product Life Cycle see Release Policy - Product Life Cycle Management
  • for information about release availability and maintenance see 
  • Release Policy - Platform availability and support
  This article describes our policy for handling this situation and minimizing the implications this can have for users.

Life Cycle

Planned features Features in development will pass through the following states:

In Progress

• Deprecation announcements will be included with each release if applicable.
• Deprecated features will continue to be supported after the deprecation announcement, for the lifetime of the current release.

Resolved

• End of support announcements will be included with each release if applicable.
• With the following release a deprecated feature becomes an unsupported feature, i.e. should problems occur then they will not be fixed.
• The functionality is still usable.

Approved

• Feature removal announcements will be included with each release if applicable.
• Unsupported features may be completely removed from future releases.

Releases

Example

status:

Status
colour Yellow title IN PROGRESS

• The issue has previously been ACCEPTED or DEFERRED within the Planning Cycle.
• The development for this feature or bug-fix is started. The issue is assigned a developer and a release.

Status
colour Green title RESOLVED

• The development process for the feature or bug-fix has been completed.
• The resolution states
  • the issue being ready for approval, i.e. awaiting verification by an approver (resolution: fixed).

Status
colour Green title APPROVED

• The issue has been confirmed to work by an approver.
• The issue will be included with the assigned releases.

Status
colour Green title RELEASED

• The feature or bug-fix is available with a release.
• This constitutes the end of the Development Cycle.
• The feature might be dropped from future releases within a Deprecation Cycle
• Lifecycle
  • A feature is announced as being deprecated with release 1.8:
    • This feature will still be included in all maintenance releases1.8.1, 1.8.2 etc.
  • This feature will then be announced as being unsupported from release 1.9:
    • This feature will still be included in all maintenance releases 1.9.1, 1.9.2 etc.
    • Support will not be provided if an unsupported feature should break in a release 1.9 or later
  • This feature may be removed in a subsequent release such as 1.10 or later.
• Please note:
• The period between releases will usually be around three months.
This means that you will have about six months to modify your configuration and to upgrade to replacement features.