MuseScore release cycles

Hello fellow developers and testers,

we have released 4 updates after the initial MuseScore 3 release. We have seen an incredible drop of negative feedback in the "Leave feedback" survey regarding crashes and performance. The editor has become a lot more stable and fast. Meanwhile, a lot of improvements and new features/projects are upcoming (thanks to our participation in the Google Summer of Code).

Previous updates were a bit chaotic in terms of scheduling. We are learning and seeing a lot of feedback regarding the quality of the release process from contributors and testers.

Release process

• We prepare a release branch and all the packages by Friday noon.
• There are three days for testers and contributors to play with the new version and find any regressions that have been introduced with the new update
• Monday is the day to collect the feedback, analyse the reported regressions/issues and fix them
• Tuesday is the day to prepare final release packages and deliver them to end users

What is in the new updates?

• Already existing pull requests which have been approved/reviewed and were not the part of the previous updates
• The pull requests which were created between updates

Priority and severity

We shared the updated policy of the Priority/Severity fields.

According to the policy, there should be about 15-25 P0-Critical bugs in the issue tracker which define the focus of the release. Priorities are defined by core contributors/testers and based on numerous factors including severity, number of reports, affected users, etc.