Product Roadmap Update

[Darius Panahy]

In previous IET product releases our approach has been to provide a stable interface between client and server software so that customers could upgrade the servers to obtain the latest enhancements and fixes but did not also have to upgrade the clients. For example, a GuardIEn 8.7.0 release of the client could be used with any service pack release of the servers. The only pre-requisites were that the client release had to be at the same major version (i.e. 8.7) and also at the same level or lower than the server release.

This approach, created to reduce the upgrade impact of service packs for customers, inevitably resulted in some constraints on the nature of changes that could be made within a release: some enhancements required a change to both clients and servers and hence could only be delivered in the next major release.

Up until now we typically planned our major releases to coincide with a new release of CA Gen. However, with Broadcom moving to a Continuous Delivery (CD) approach for CA Gen, we have decided to also make some changes to our delivery approach.

IET will now support two concurrent releases with the following characteristics:

The ‘Maintenance’ Release

• The maintenance release will only receive fixes to existing functionality.
  
• A service pack upgrade will not require a client upgrade when the server is upgraded.
  
• The current Maintenance release is 8.7.
  

The ‘Continuous Delivery (CD)’ Release

• The CD release will receive new features and enhancements (as well as fixes to existing functionality).
  
• A service pack upgrade may require a client upgrade (i.e. if upgrading from 8.8.0 to 8.8.1, it may be necessary to upgrade both clients and servers).
  
• New CA Gen features requiring a corresponding enhancement in our products might only be supported in the CD release.
  
• The first CD release will be 8.8, scheduled for launch in Q3 2021.
  
• Third-party pre-requisite software will not be changed within a major release.
  

Customers can therefore choose whether to use the maintenance release to avoid the requirement to upgrade clients, or take advantage of new features in the CD release, albeit with the potential requirement that they will need to upgrade the clients as well as the servers.

This applies to the majority of IET products that use a common installation: GuardIEn, genIE, VerifIEr, IET-Assist, Object List+, pathvIEw and Studio Developer. Other products (Rapide and xTrace) already use a Continuous Delivery approach and have separate releases).

New major releases will still be delivered on a rolling schedule so, for example, when the next major release after 8.8 is available, 8.7 will be retired and 8.8 will then become the new ‘Maintenance Release’.

Note that Release 8.6 is being retired on 30th June 2021. At present there is no retirement date set for Release 8.7.

If you have any questions, then please do not hesitate to contact us.