Product management & assembly versions.

Question

We are approaching the initial release of a new product at our company, and I am trying to determine the best method of managing the versions of all of the different components and cross referencng those components with the marketing department version of our software. For various reasons, marketing has determined that the initial release of our product will be 10.1, however all of the components will initially start out at 1.0.0. Through normal bug fixes and patching and continued development work, the different components will no longer be at the same version number, so when marketing department decides it's time for version 10.2, it might contain 1.1.54, 1.2.32, 1.8.2, etc. Obviously, I could use a simple spreadsheet, but that isn't exactly the most user friendly method, and has issues for our tech support people to cross-reference the component versions (the customer is really only aware of version 10.1, 10.2, etc).

Is there a more "professional" method for this, or is a simple spreadsheet the best option?

Answer 1

At places where I've worked, we'd force the software version number to match the official, public (i.e. Marketing's) release number: if they wanted to ship "10.1" then that's what we'd set the software's version resource to, as part of the release build.

Answer 2

Why not leave all components at their "random" version numbers and create one super tag/label with the marketing version that encompasses all components? This allows you to keep updating the components in-between marketing builds and increment their build versions (without having to go to 10.1.001, 10.1.002 that may be visible to the customer) and also keep track of the marketing build. Also, what happens if you update some components for the next marketing build, but not others? Do you need to build those components just to update the version number?

Depending on your source control system, you should be able to easily create a release with a specified name/version that contains all of these components at different versions.

You should also just need to update one properties file with the marketing build number so it shows on all about screens, splash screens, tool bars, etc. If you don't have such a configuration in place, you may want to move to such a system. This allows for easy changes to the customer visible number while maintaining all component build numbers. Besides, what happens when marketing determines that the next version isn't going to be 10.2, but "Crimson?"

Answer 3

The main principle I'd suggest is: Use the simplest scheme you can.

Consider making things easy for yourself, your marketing department, and your users.

When you do a release, increment the major/minor version number, and then stamp that across all your components. So in the 10.1 release, all your assemblies will have version numbers 10.1.xx.yy

Then if you really want to complicate matters with different versions within a release (e.g. for minor patches/updates, different customer variants, or just for internal daily or CI builds), then use the xx.yy fields. (In many cases you can get the compiler to automatically fill these two fields in with the date/time of compilation, for example).

This means you have a meaningful "marketing version" which is actually linked to your code versions (so you and marketing can talk about a particular release without any chance of confusion), and you can add extra information (e.g. build date) if (and only if) needed on the dev side.

edit: P.S. Even if a component doesn't change, rebuild it with the new version number. Trying to track a hundred out-of-sync version numbers is an avoidable nightmare.