What does "RC1" really mean?

Vista Goes Gold!

Steve Rowe's Blog — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 20:29:24 GMT

Windows Vista--the product I've been working on for much of the last 5 years--has finally shipped . Hopefully

re: What does "RC1" really mean?

Maurits — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 13:17:44 GMT

Adam: typically, "alpha release" is an oxymoron; alpha (as I understand it) is only used for internal builds.

I agree that alpha builds are not expected to be stable in any sense of the word, but I think you're doubly-interpreting two meanings of "stable" in your last sentence:

stable(1): doesn't crash
stable(2): features don't change

I agree that betas should show a certain level of stable(1). But I disagree with your assertion that once you've released a beta, you can't make major changes to the product.

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re: What does "RC1" really mean?

Adam — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 23:04:17 GMT

"In the beta time frame, there can be new features added and major changes made. We use betas to seek feedback and then make changes based on that feedback."

Ummmm....isn't that what most of the rest of the software development world calls "alpha"? "new features" and "major changes" are things that tend to reduce stability somewhat, and "alpha" builds are not necessarily expected to be stable. OTOH, "beta" releases are generally thought of as being of increasing stability/quality, and therefore not very open to "new features" and "major changes".

re: What does "RC1" really mean?

SteveRowe — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 09:35:40 GMT

(Please note I'm not speaking officially here. These are just my observations.)

Good question Supercat. Beta 2 was considered feature complete but we knew that feedback from it would prompt substantive changes. Going into the beta, we expected to be making big changes. Going into the RC, we don't. Additionally, a beta might be released with some known bad bugs as long as they aren't in mainstream scenarios. For the RC, we hope to have all the really big stuff fixed.

re: What does "RC1" really mean?

superrcat — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 05:22:30 GMT

"In the beta time frame, there can be new features added and major changes made. We use betas to seek feedback and then make changes based on that feedback."

Then why was Beta 2 considered feature complete and what would be the point of releasing it as Beta 2 and not as RC0?

-superrcat

re: What does "RC1" really mean?

SteveRowe — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 01:30:11 GMT

Thanks for the history lesson James. That's why I limited my response to the past few decades. I didn't realize the word meant something different at IBM but I figured if it did have a different meaning, it would be back then. Thanks for letting me know that it was different way back when. I have a bit of an interest in the history of computing so it's always cool to learn something like this.

re: What does "RC1" really mean?

James Curran — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 23:42:21 GMT

Grant the corruption of the word "beta" has been under way for a very long time (which is why I included the brief history of the word), but it really did orginally mean essentially "release candidate". It dates back to the IBM mainframe, pre-shrink wrapped software days, where the total distribution of an application was generally under 100 copies, and frequently under 10. There were no user-friendly GUIs nor variations in the hardware platform, nor, for the most part, multiple-function applications. "Something that still expected a lot of change" in those days was "Something that just didn't work" and would not have been released to anyone-- The tester would have consider it just a waste of his time.

re: What does "RC1" really mean?

Maurits [MSFT] — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 19:59:25 GMT

The problem with words is that people use them as sponges to absorb meaning. As words change meaning over time, cognitive dissonance is unfortunate but inevitable.

"Words mean things"
-- Apocryphal

"When *I* use a word," Humpty Dumpty said ... "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
-- Lewis Carrol, /Alice through the Looking Glass/

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet."
-- Shakespeare

re: What does "RC1" really mean?

SteveRowe — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 19:33:10 GMT

Adam, I didn't mean to imply that an RC is like a beta. What I intended to be saying is that it was a particular build that we iterated on to drive it to quality. This is the same process we use for a beta or one of the interim CTP releases. The criteria for and purpose of an RC release is different than that of a beta. In the beta time frame, there can be new features added and major changes made. We use betas to seek feedback and then make changes based on that feedback. An RC release is the first one where we don't expect to be making major changes afterwards.

James, beta has never (at least not for the past few decades that I've been paying attention) meant release candidate. A beta release was always something that still expected a lot of change. The change in betas recently is that with the internet they've become much more public. Their purpose hasn't changed terribly much though.

I'm not sure why the vitriol over what we decide to call our releases. If we wanted to call them "fred" it shouldn't matter.