Release Candidate

See also: The Software Cycle

Late in the life cycle of a developing program, applied to the post-beta stage. This is software which is understood to have some bug stoppers but only one or two potential “show stoppers”.

There can be multiple Release Candidates usually abreviated by RC1, RC2, etc.

Examples

  • OS X version 10.0 was considered by some in the community to be a Release Candidate with a wide number of bugs. 10.1 was considered the true 1.0 version of OS X.
  • The Mozilla Project regularly releases a beta and up to three release candidates to make certain that as many bugs as possible are removed from the official distribution. This is one of the few non-1.0 programs that gains press on Slashdot.

TakeDown.NET -> “Release-Candidate