Getting Started with Versioning

Versioning is one of those things that can be done in many different ways.

Choosing a versioning schema

Almost every team I’ve worked on came up with their own versioning schema. When starting a new project, we would often spend time debating how we were going to version our releases. And yet, coming up with our versioning schema was usually a waste of time. The goals of versioning are simple; we need a unique identifier of a release as well as an indication of whether a change breaks backward compatibility. Given that others already agreed on the format that fulfills those objectives, the best we can do is to use the convention. Otherwise, we are wasting our time reinventing the wheel without understanding that a few things are likely going to go wrong down the line.

Expectation of users

First of all, our users might need to know whether our release is production-ready and whether it breaks compatibility with the previous releases. To be honest, most users don’t even want to know that, and they will merely expect our applications to ...