Application Stability

Stability of Enterprise systems is important. Software is complex and by its very nature each new release may add new functionality and new bugs. These can vary in sensitivity, from simply not working as the end user expects them to work, to causing full blown system crashes. For companies that rely on Alfresco to provide content management services (either for traditional management of office documents,  supporting the content delivered to your web site,  managing and controlling corporate records, or for managing team content) having access to the system is critical.

Alfresco spends a lot of time and effort ensuring that as many issues and bugs are identified and fixed before the Alfresco Enterprise Edition is released. The QA process starts with the Alfresco Community Edition. Before the final build is released the Community version goes through a QA process. Dedicated QA engineers validate the release running on an Open Source stack. After this version is released the engineers create a branch in the code line – and this becomes the Alfresco Enterprise Edition (see diagram below).

QA now kicks in a major way. Over a period of some months a team of dedicated QA engineers  run almost 5000 tests against a range of different technology stacks – both Open Source and proprietary - to identify and fix as many problems as possible. The release is tested for stability, scalability and security and is tested in both single system and clustered configurations. The Alfresco Engineering team work to correct any issues / bugs that are identified.

During this process Alfresco will make a number of beta releases available to selected customers. This not only allows customers to validate the new release in their environment, but has the added benefit of real world testing, which will identify even more bugs, which get fixed before the product is released.

At the end of this process the Alfresco Enterprise Edition is released to Enterprise customers. But QA and Engineering’s job does not end there. Although QA run 5000 tests per stack, they can’t test for every possible combination or application usage. So new bugs are identified and fixed. These are made available to Enterprise customers via patches – with proactive notification being sent out. These fixes are also back ported to previous versions that customers may still be using.

A common question is do these fixes and patches make it back into the Alfresco Community Edition and when? While the Enterprise Edition is going through the extensive QA and release process  the Community Edition code line is being developed for the next release, with new features being added and daily builds being run. For this reason it can be months after a serious problem is identified before a fix makes it to the Community version of the code. Until then Community users will need to either fix it themselves, rely on the Community for a fix or find another work around. Also, when the fixes are merged it is with a new code line, with new functionality and potential instability from the daily build process.

Bottom Line: Alfresco Enterprise Edition customers get a tried and tested version of Alfresco that has gone through an extensive QA and release process with patches and fixes to ensure product stability and maximize application uptime. The focus is on stability and enterprise fitness not new features.