Release Types

Unique features two different release types, modes or models:

• Continuous Releases for our Platform as a Service model

• Regular Releases for these models

  • Single Tenant

  • Customer Managed Tenant

  • On Premise Tenant

Overview

Continuous releases

Unique releases continuously every single change to Platform as a Service.

Regular releases

Uniques current release cycle is weekly. Depending on the customers choice this frequency can be lowered (e.g. to monthly) upon request.

While the frequency for customer-managed and on premise tenant can be increased by the client themselves, Unique does not offer a higher frequency for Single-Tenants.

Release Lifecycle

About the Lifecycle

Releasing software in phases allows developers to manage risk and improve product quality by systematically testing and refining the software. It begins with internal testing to catch major bugs, then moves to external testing where real-world users provide feedback on functionality and usability. The release candidate phase follows, focusing on identifying remaining critical issues before the final version. This phased approach helps ensure that the software is stable, meets user needs, and reduces the likelihood of significant issues in the final release, thus enhancing customer satisfaction and reducing costly post-release fixes.

You can learn more about Unique's approach to software development in Secure Software Development Lifecycle or Release Process.

Phases and Objectives

Unique currently maintains 3 phases…

* These phases are explicitly excluded from any SLA, only changes that have matured to GA are covered by any SLA. Support for these changes is on best-effort basis.

EXPERIMENTAL

EXPERIMENTAL changes or features are tested with a very small user base, most often a few specific individuals. There are two outcomes to this only:

1. Unique discovers an added value for the client and progresses the change to BETA

2. Unique identifies issues, problems or inefficiencies and basically terminates the experiment

BETA

BETA changes or features already have a stable place within the product and are getting tested against a larger user base.

There is still the option that Unique decides to sunset or terminate a change in this state prematurely but it is highly unlikely and not the goal.

General Availability (GA)

Features and changes that matured to GA have been or are scheduled to be released to all clients, users and/or tenants. They are here to stay and are constantly quality-assured, improved, enhanced or changed by Unique's product teams.

Changes in GA can be sunset or deprecated but it is uncommon and rare. It would involve proper communication, sunsetting notices and durations as well as the implementation of replacing functionality.

Release Content

As seen in the Secure Software Development Lifecycle Unique provides a variety of artefacts per release, delivery or rollout cycle.

One Unique release consists of:

Setting up & Maintaining Releases

Rolling out regular releases (the release content) to Customer Managed Tenants or On Premise Tenants is a topic on its own and you clean learn more about it in

Release Naming

Continuous release names

The continuous releases are not additionally named, they use short SHAs to identify which version it is.

You find them on various screens and they consist of a hexadecimal representation like 37cd467.

Weekly release names

Our release names follow the simple pattern of

<YYYY>-<CW>(-I)
YYYY Year
CW Calendar Week Padded
I Numeric counter if fixes provided

Examples are

2023-01 // padded
2023-12
2023-34
2023-34-1 // patch 1
2023-34-2 // patch 2 - shame on us to need two fixes