Servoy Release Policy update

It has been approximately 8 months since Servoy 7 .0 was released, which brought us the Servoy Mobile Client. Since that release we’ve adopted a quicker release cycle, which so far has resulted in the release of Servoy 7.0.1, 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3.

Our goal with the faster release cycle is to bring new features, bug fixes and improvements to you, our customers in a more agile fashion. It is also a logical result of adopting the Agile Development approach over 2 years ago throughout our organization.

The faster release cycle has changed our policy with regards to supported versions and maintenance releases slightly. As before, Servoy still actively supports 2 previous versions besides the latest. Currently those versions are:

• Servoy 5.2.x
• Servoy 6.0.x
• Servoy 7.x

As the Servoy 7.x branch can be considered Servoy 6.1 + Servoy Mobile, we hereby announce that the 6.1 branch will be merged into the 7.x branch as of November 8th 2013. This means that from that day onward, existing installations of the Servoy Application Server 6.1.x or Servoy Developer 6.1.x can be upgraded to Servoy 7.3 through the auto-update mechanism and the 6.1.x branch will be archived.

For the Servoy 7.x branch, the supported version is always the latest release, currently 7.3. Maintenance releases on the supported 7.x release will only be provided in case of blocking issues in production environments.

With more and more rapid releases, there is the obvious need to even more tightly control the quality of the releases. To assure this we’ve:

• launched our Beta Customer Program
  The Beta Customer Program is for customers that have formal testing procedures in place for their Servoy Solutions. Member of the Beta Customer Program get advanced notice of upcoming releases, in order to anticipate in their planning for the time needed to execute their test suite against the upcoming release candidate. To join the Beta Customer Program please contact your Servoy sales representative or email sales@servoy.com
• changed our release procedure to always provide at least a public Release Candidate 2 weeks prior to the planned release
• intermediate builds available on request
  Besides official alpha, beta, release candidates and final releases, is is possible to request so-called intermediate builds. This is build based on the latest code in a certain branch, with a big disclaimer that the build has not gone through our full Q&A cycle. To request an intermediate build, please contact your sales representative or email sales@servoy.com
  Note: our goal is to automatically provide intermediate builds at regular intervals, but at this moment we don’t have an ETA for that.
  • extended support for automated testing
    Servoy has had UnitTesting support in the IDE for many year, including support for running the UnitTests automatically on a build server each time a change was made to the codebase of a solution.
    Over the last few months we switched to Jenkins instead of CruiseControl for Continuous Build integration, which takes care of automatically running of all UnitTests when changes are mode to the codebase.
    Additionally, support was added to perform UI Tests in both the Smart and Web Client and currently work is underway to add UI Testing support for the Mobile Client. Next step after that is integration of the UI tests into the Continuous Build integration.
    For the latest documentation on Automated Testing support, see our Automated Testing Guide

Through these initiatives we solicit the Servoy Community to actively participate in helping us test upcoming versions to make them rock solid releases.

Paul Bakker
Product Manager