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Software Engineering vocabulary · Release and Maintenance

Code freeze

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, code freeze means: A period before a release, or during busy times such as holidays, when no new code changes may be merged except critical fixes.

In Turkish: kod dondurma, değişiklik yasağı dönemi

How it is used

Teams announce 'We're in code freeze until Monday' or 'Code freeze starts Thursday at noon'. Online shops often have a code freeze around big sale days. A 'feature freeze' is lighter: no new features, but bug fixes are still allowed.

Example sentences

  1. Code freeze starts on Wednesday, so get your pull requests merged before then.

  2. During the Black Friday code freeze, only the on-call engineer can deploy.

Common collocations

  • code freeze starts
  • during the code freeze
  • feature freeze
  • lift the code freeze
  • releaseA version of a product that is made available to users, or the act of making it available. Also a verb: to release a new version.
  • hotfixAn urgent fix for a serious problem in production, released quickly outside the normal release schedule.
  • deployTo put a new version of software onto servers or devices so that it starts running there, for example in a test environment or for real users.
  • stagingAn environment set up to be as close as possible to production, where a team checks a release one last time before real users get it.

More terms: Release and Maintenance

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