I am glad to announce that yesterday we released NativeScript 2.4. This is all good, but in this post I would like to discuss the future. If you take a look at the next GitHub milestone you will see this
So, why 2.5.0-RC?
There are many reasons for this. Firstly, it is hard to make a feature right from the first time. And by “right” I don’t mean correct but also right from technical perspective. It’s not easy to say but every developer knows the difference a solution and the right solution. Secondly, often our requirements are incomplete and we need feedback as soon as possible in order to ship the right feature. Even with complete requirements it will take longer for development, thus delaying the user feedback. Following the analogy with minimum viable product (MVP), you can think of minimum viable technical implementation that (almost) meets the current requirements. As with many other release approaches it is a trade-off. Shipping RC is a sweet spot as we will offer reasonable product quality in a timely manner. Each RC will be followed shortly by an official release. So far, our release history shows that a week or two is enough to fix all corner-case issues and apply other minor fixes.
Of course, there are drawbacks. Probably the biggest one is that there will be increased operational costs for actual shipping RC or required changes in the test infrastructure for example. I think this is a good incentive to automate even more the existing processes and infrastructures so it will be a win-win situation. Stay tuned.