Possible Duplicate:What “version naming convention” do you use? Do you change your major/minor/patch version numbers right before you release or right after?Example: You just released 1.0.0 to the world (huzzah!). But wait, don't celebrate too much. 1.1.0 is coming out in six weeks! So you fix a bug and do a new build. What's that build called? 1.1.0.0 or 1.0.0.xxxy (where xxxy is the build number of 1.0.0 incremented)?Keep in mind you may have 100 features and bugs to go into 1.1.0. So it might be good to call it 1.0.0.xxxy, because you're nowhere close to 1.1.0. But on the other hand, another dev may be working on 2.0.0, in which case your build might be better named 1.1.0.0 and his 2.0.0.0 instead of 1.0.0.xxxy and 1.0.0.xxxz, respectively.
When do you change your major/minor/patch version number?
versioning
After you release your software, the version number should be incremented immediately.Why?Let's assume you're following a scheme like Semantic Versioning, and you have a build number in the version. So you might have [Major].[Minor].[Patch].[Build]. I am going to call the [Major].[Minor].[Patch] part the version.You will be creating multiple builds during development. Each build is a development snapshot of your next release. It makes sense to use the same version for your development and release builds. The version indicates what release you're working toward.If you're preparing for release and the software passes all of its tests, you won't want to rebuild and retest the software just because you had to update the version. When you eventually make a release, you are stating that build 1.1.0.23 shall henceforth be referred to as version 1.1.0.The increment-after-release model makes sense for branching too. Suppose you have a mainline development branch, and you create maintenance branches for releases. The moment you create your release branch, your development branch is no longer linked to that release's version number. The development branch contains code that is part of the next release, so the version should reflect that.