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Moments ago Jeff Atwood said the following on twitter:
Look, I love rapid new software releases, but the frequency of WordPress releases is just ridiculous.
Which makes me think, how often should you release software updates?
Whats the best release strategy?
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If you look at some large software companies, in the early days of software development, most software companies planned out releases much in advance. This approach is followed when product is in growth stage. Usual time frame is between 3 and 6 months.
Agile release cycles should certainly be kept shorter than a year, and are often as short as six months or three months. A release is, in turn, made up of iterations. For a given project, iteration length will typically be fixed at a length somewhere between a week and a month.
Frequent releases can help ensure that the lifetime of bugs is short.
So, if you're doing continuous delivery, you have the option of releasing as frequently as you like—every day, every month or even every hour.
I would say in WordPress' specific case, they conflate "security updates" and "functionality updates". This is bad.
This would be like having to do an in-place reinstall of Windows every time a security bug was found, instead of simply downloading a small patch every week.
WordPress needs to have a security patch mechanism that's simple, fast, and easy for the security updates. A process that is separate from the normal upgrade flow of new versions.
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The frequency of Wordpress releases is so frequent because they care about security and release updates that fix known vulnerabilities as quickly as they can. Functionality updates to Wordpress happen much less frequently, in the range of every 4 to 6 months I think.
I think this is a good model. Keep your customers happy by releasing new features regularly, but if you find security flaws, release fixes immediately.
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