Testing – Keeping Test and Release Version Numbers in Sync

First off, there is no correct way.

However, I have found that keeping all version numbers the same across releases, regardless of whether things have changed or not, makes things much easier down the road. If I want to know what has been going on in a software, all I want is to be able to easily go from a version number to a state in version control, and see whats going on in there. Having a collection of unrelated version numbers makes doing that murky.

The alternative is that ultimately you have to maintain some sort of BOM for your software releases to know what's what, and those invariable end up out of date or incorrect, and everything just becomes a big mess.

There have been situations I've worked on where products did have a mismatch of version numbers for various dlls. It was a medical device software, and the developers rationalized that by not changing certain parts, they could avoid doing testing and verification for those parts. It may have saved work there, but it has created plenty of other work and harmed credibility with distributors when even the company wasn't sure what was what because of the hard to understand versioning scheme.

There are pre-release phases for software products: alpha, beta, and release candidate. It depends on how mature your product is. An alpha release would tend to indicate that the application is still relatively unstable and perhaps buggy. This would be anything up to a feature-complete release. As you move toward feature-complete, you may want to consider your software a beta release. It may still be buggy at this point, but it should be stable enough for demonstrations and previews. A release candidate should be feature complete, but may still have some bugs.

You would apply these to your "2.0.0" version. So your "2.0.0 Alpha" is an alpha release of what will become 2.0.0 software. You can change Alpha to Beta and then Release Candidate (or RC) as your software becomes more stable. Sometimes, instead of spelling the words out, it is shortened to "2.0.0a", "2.0.0b", and "2.0.0rc" for the alpha, beta, and release candidate versions of 2.0.0. If you did multiple builds that could be considered a release, you could also append a number after the letters. For example, if you did three beta releases leading up to 2.0.0, they would be 2.0.0b, 2.0.0b1, and so on (you could index from 0 or even call your first beta b1, if you wanted).

Wikipedia also has a length discussion of software versioning. It discusses various versioning schemes used by different applications. It includes a brief discussion of pre-release versions as well. Considering that this is a rewrite of an application, you could throw away the old versioning scheme and choose a more appropriate one if you wanted to.