"When are new features coming out?" is one of the most common questions we hear about Oxygen. Although we don’t publicly promise specific features and release dates, we can take you behind the scenes to explain how our release cycle works.
Oxygen follows a five-phase release cycle:
After releasing a version of Oxygen, we start with the feature development phase for the next version.
The feature development phase begins immediately after releasing a new version of Oxygen.
This phase is all about adding new features and capabilities to Oxygen.
During this phase, we don't spend much time on bug fixes. Unless a bug warrants an emergency hotfix or patch release, we usually wait for the alpha phase to address it.
After all the features are in and we do our own internal testing, we release an alpha of the new version of Oxygen.
Once the alpha is released, we are in the alpha / bug fix phase. In this phase, we fix bugs reported to us that were present in the previous release, also fix bugs with the new functionality added in the feature development phase.
After we’re confident that the alpha is mostly free of bugs, we release it as the beta.
The beta phase is the last chance for bug fixes before the final release.
After we’re confident that the beta is good enough to release as the next version, we first release it as a release candidate. The release candidate is simply a final check to make sure that the bugs we fixed during the beta didn’t introduce any severe new problems.
Additional bugs reported during this phase, unless they are true showstoppers or were recently introduced by a change made in the alpha / beta phases, will wait for the next release.
If all is well, we now publish the next final release of Oxygen. Then the feature development cycle begins again.
Have an idea for a new feature, enhancement, or improvement to Oxygen? Request it on our forums.
Encountering a bug? Contact our support team or post it on our forums.
Development of Oxygen is entirely based on what we think customers want.
