Product Life Cycle
This document presents the Product Life Cycle of Saagie products and details the rules managing the products’ introduction on the market throughout their withdrawal. A product is a tightly integrated software entity that follows a discrete lifecycle. Each product has an independent lifecycle versus other products.
A product is composed of several releases that are made available over time. A release is a product delivery encompassing a coherent set of features including product documentation. A release is identified by a unique release number. Unless specified otherwise in the product documentation, the product life cycle described in this document applies to all product releases that were released after June 30th, 2021.
1. Product End-of-Life Planning
2. Versioning
The versioning of each product is based on 3 levels (X.Y.Z):
2.1 Major Release
Major Releases (X.y.z) are vehicles for delivering major and minor feature development and enhancements to existing features. They incorporate all applicable defect corrections made in prior Major Releases, Minor Releases and Service Packs.
Major releases are also vehicles for feature deprecation or end-of-life and can imply functional incompatibilities with previous releases – i.e. breaking changes. Major releases can also introduce compliance mandated changes such as new security rules or new software prerequisites.
2.2 Minor Release
Minor Releases (x.Y.z) are vehicles for delivering minor feature developments, enhancements to existing features, and defect corrections. They incorporate all applicable defect corrections made in prior Minor Releases and Service Packs.
2.3 Service Pack
Service Packs (x.y.Z) are vehicles for delivering defect corrections. They incorporate all applicable defect corrections made in prior Service Packs.
3. Product release statuses
3.1 Technical Preview
Technical Preview (TP) is a status option for a new product or a new release of an existing product that can be used by customers to provide feedback and test specific functionalities during the development process.
The functionalities may not be 100% complete. There is no commitment that the functionalities in a Technical Preview will be integrated in a General Availability release. A Technical Preview is not production ready and must never be used in a production environment. Saagie Support SLAs do not apply to a Technical Preview.
3.2 Restricted Availability
The Restricted Availability (RA) status represents the phase during which a release is distributed to a limited number of customers, selected by Saagie, prior to the General Availability.
An RA release is fully tested and can be deployed in a production environment. An RA release is supported until the next General Availability release.
3.3 General Availability
General Availability (GA) is a status for a release which is fully supported, can be deployed in a production environment and is available without restriction to all customers.
3.4 Retirement
A Retired release will be supported for up to 12 months from the initial retirement date. Saagie will no longer provide product enhancements for Retired Software. Saagie recommends that Customers do not continue to develop new applications or projects based on a Retired release.
3.5 End of Life
An End of Life release is no longer supported by Saagie. Saagie strongly recommends that customers migrate to a fully supported release of the product as soon as possible to maintain the highest level of support for their applications and systems.
4. Product support lifecycle
When a new Major Release becomes Generally Available, the previous release is Retired 9 months after this date.
When a Minor Release becomes Generally Available, the previous release, within a given Major Release, is Retired 3 months after this date.
5. Feature deprecation
Deprecation corresponds to the announcement and warning that a product feature, component, artifact or API will be removed or disabled from a release and will no longer be supported or maintained. The effective removal of the feature, component, artifact or API is applied to the next Major Release in General Availability. Saagie will provide an advance notice of a minimum of 6 months before removing a feature, component, artifact, or API and at the end of this deprecation period, will stop supporting the deprecated feature.
The life cycle of third party software embedded in Saagie products is out of Saagie’s control. Support and use for such software components can be discontinued without prior notice and Saagie shall bear no liability for such discontinuation. Saagie will use reasonable efforts to provide advance notice of any discontinuation of third party software support and/or use.
Version 1.0
July 2021
