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Policies for maintenance releases versus normal versions?

My company is struggling with the issue of service release versus “normal” releases in the context of an on-site application in large organizations that pay for support. First let me define my conditions:

  • Imagine that we have released product versions 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2. This is what I call " normal ", that is, they are the next version from the main development branch, including all the latest and greatest bug fixes and improvements (maybe dozens of each release).
  • Now imagine that one major client at 1.0 reports a show stop problem that no one has encountered before. The problem still exists in 1.2, and, unfortunately, 1.3 is not issued for several weeks or months. Therefore, we deploy our code to 1.0 to create a version 1.0.1 service containing only one change that fixes the problem.

This approach makes the customer happy because we will fix their problem within a day or so, instead of making them wait weeks before the next normal release. In addition, since the service release contains only one small change, they do not need to go through the extensive UAT process, whereas if they move to the next normal release, which may have several versions, they will receive, perhaps, 30 or 40 product changes, which ( in their risky opinion) require an extensive UAT.

The problem is that:

  • It costs us a lot to create and maintain several versions of our software.
  • This allows customers to "stick in the mud" too far behind the latest version.
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