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You have to hand it to David Wood of Symbian Foundation, he sure knows
how to whip up and manage an OS release schedule. Here he publishes the timescales for the next few releases of Symbian Foundation OS,
which make interesting reading. Of note is the numbering system (though
don't get too tied up on the way Symbian OS 9.5 runs S60 5th Edition
Feature Pack 1 which will become Symbian^2, and so on) and the mammoth
software engineering exercise that will be keeping no less than five
major OS versions all in planning/development/release all at the same
time. A recipe for disaster or a masterplan that will result in world
domination? Comments welcome!
Introducing the Release Plan
By David Wood
There’s
a lot of activity underway, throughout the software development teams
for all the different packages that make up the Symbian Platform.
These packages are finding their way into platform releases. The
plan is that there will be two platform releases each year. Here’s a
high-level picture of what’s expected over the next year or so:
Symbian^2, which is based on S60 5.1, reaches a functionally
complete state at the middle of this year, and should be hardened by
the end of the year. This means that the first devices based on
Symbian^2 could be reaching the market any time around the end of this
year - depending on the integration plans, the level of customisation,
and the design choices made by manufacturers. Symbian^3 follows on
six months later - reaching a functionally complete state at the end of
this year, and should be hardened by the middle of 2010.
In the picture, the yellow arrow roughly indicates the time period
in which the code for a platform release is available. The milestones
in a platform release are overseen by the Release Council on behalf of
the community:
- Prior to functionally complete, the platform grows as new features are added by contributors
- Between functionally complete and hardened the development community focuses on driving up stability of the platform by testing and contributing defect fixes
- After hardened the release enters a more stable phase.
Contributed defect fixes will continue to be incorporated by package
owners for around 12 months, but prime focus will be on later releases.
Progress towards both milestones will be governed by contributions
from the community. The intent is to “timebox” each release by fixing
the functionally complete date and including only features that deliver
in time at a reasonable stability level. This is the same principle
that has worked so well with integrated releases of Symbian OS in
recent years.
For a fuller picture of the lifecycle of a platform release, take a look at this:
As you can see, the diamonds representing the “functionally
complete” milestones are paced out six months apart - though it’s open
to the Release Council to alter the timing. There will typically be 5
platforms under engineering development at any one time:
- One release - Symbian^N say (abbreviated to “S^N”) will be in the hardening phase
- Two previous releases will be in the stable phase
- The next release (S^ N+1) will be in feature submission phase
- The one after that (S^ N+2) will be in early builds.
There will also be roadmap plans for releases happening even later.
The feature set for Symbian^2 is already virtually frozen. Most of
the content for Symbian^3 is already agreed, but there’s scope for
contributors to make a difference. The content for releases from
Symbian^4 onwards is much more open for debate.
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