PowerShell Universal Release Cadence

PowerShell Universal

January 12, 2023

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Adjusting Focus

We’ve been aggressive with our feature release cadence at Ironman Software since the beginning of the company. Innovating at all costs has been a corner stone of what we do and has allowed us to create amazing tools such as PowerShell Universal. That said, this mantra has started to show its limits by sacrificing stability for added functionality. Minor releases are proving to be painful endeavors for our team and customers. We want upgrades to be exciting roll outs of fixes or quality-of-life features that don’t cause additional headaches.

Starting today, we will be operating on a bi-monthly feature release cadence for PowerShell Universal. This will allow the team the necessary time to thoroughly develop and test new features in the product. Bug fix releases will continue to be released based on customer need and will not introduce any new features.

We will also be isolating parts of the platform to changes only in major versions. These currently will include:

While these features will receive bug fixes or minor adjustments to functionality, they will not receive any large feature changes in minor versions.

Features you will still see in minor releases:

When appropriate, we will be enabling feature flags for functionality that may be available in production builds but should only be turned on for customers willing to experiment with features yet to be released. We will be tagging issues in our repository to indicate where they are aligned with this strategy. You will see both tags and milestones that dictate when you can expect functionality to surface.

One Major Version a Year

Customers rely on our platform and having to constantly update it for bug fixes, but also with the risk of breaking changes, is not sustainable for our team or our customers. We aspire to providing minor releases that could be automatically applied without concern to stability. Due to this, we will be restricting major version changes to once a year. Major changes will allow us to update portions of the code base deemed critical with ample time to develop and test the functionality. In addition, these changes will be provided as beta releases throughout the year.

Why are we doing this?

Every release of PowerShell Universal is tested in our internal labs to verify functionality and stability. That said, as the platform has grown and the flexibility has expanded, it’s has become difficult to adequately test releases that contain major changes every month with the confidence we desire. With a renewed focus on stability and a more tempered approach to our release cadence, we can provide a more stable system for your automation environments without sacrificing the innovation that has been paramount to PowerShell Universal’s success.

When’s the next release of PowerShell Universal?

The next minor release of PowerShell Universal will be on March 14th, 2023. The next major version will be on June 13th, 2023. This is one year from the original release of PowerShell Universal v3. We will be dropping support for PowerShell Universal v2 at this time.

Where can I find out what is in each release?

Our release milestones are published on GitHub. We will typically plan certain issues for a release and will always provide a release date. You can find milestones here: https://github.com/ironmansoftware/issues/milestones

What about PowerShell Pro Tools?

PowerShell Pro Tools has had a much more measured approach to features and bug fixes over the last year. We will continue to release PowerShell Pro Tools on a monthly basis with bug fix releases happening based on customer neeed.

Questions

Please contact us if you have any questions about the future release cycles for PowerShell Universal. If you’re concerned about a feature request or bug report you have provided , don’t hesitate to reach out.