DITA Open Toolkit release management

The DITA-OT project works with an agile development process; it releases test (milestone) builds approximately every month, and it encourages feedback on the test builds while function is being developed. Stable releases are typically issued approximately every six months.

Each iteration begins with a meeting of project contributors. The meeting minutes are stored on the project Wiki and are available to the public. Active contributors are directly invited to these meetings, but anybody interested in the DITA-OT development is welcome to attend. If you are interested in attending these meetings, join the dita-ot-developer mailing list and send a note to the list or list owners.

Each iteration kick-off meeting covers the following topics:

  • Issues from the previous iteration
  • Plans from each contributor for the upcoming iteration or for new work that will span multiple iterations
  • Design discussion for any significant planned features or fixes
  • Longer-term plans for contributions to the current or following release
  • (As needed) Other project issues or hot topics, such as changes to the test and build process, interest from new contributors, etc.

The kick-off meeting for the final iteration before a stable build covers the following topics:

  • Evaluation of what is allowed in the iteration; the final iteration typically has no major changes in order to assure quality in the stable build.
  • Assessment of whether all release notes and other artifacts are up-to-date and ready for a final build.

When an iteration is complete, the build is uploaded to SourceForge. Test builds are placed in the Latest Test Build folder. At the end of a release cycle, the builds are loaded to the Stable Release folder, and the project information is updated to reflect the latest release.

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