Release Policy - Deprecation Cycle

Scope

Feature Life Cycle Management includes that released features may eventually be replaced by new functions, i.e. they are subject to a Deprecation Cycle:
- the Deprecation Cycle is performed for features that previously have been subject to a Development Cycle.
This article describes
- the policy for handling of deprecation and minimizing the impact on users.
- the mapping to the respective status in the Change Management System.
Further resources for life cycle management
- for the overall Product Life Cycle see Release Policy - Product Life Cycle Management
- for information about release availability and maintenance see Release Policy - Platform availability and support

Deprecated Features will pass through the following status:

Deprecation announcements will be included with each release if applicable.
Deprecated features will continue to be supported after the deprecation announcement for the lifetime of the current release.
The resolution is set to deprecated.

End of support announcements will be included with each release if applicable.
With the current release a previously deprecated feature becomes an unsupported feature, i.e. should problems occur then they will not be fixed.
The functionality is still usable.
The resolution is set to deprecated.

Lifecycle
- A feature is announced as being deprecated with release 1.8:
  - This feature will still be included in all maintenance releases1.8.1, 1.8.2 etc.
- This feature will then be announced as being unsupported from release 1.9:
  - This feature will still be included in all maintenance releases 1.9.1, 1.9.2 etc.
  - Support will not be provided if an unsupported feature should break in a release 1.9 or later
- This feature may be removed in a subsequent release such as 1.10 or later.
Please note:
- The period between releases will usually be around three months.
- This means that you will have about six months time to modify your configuration and to upgrade to replacement features.