Software Stability Levels

Apr 5, 2023 · 148 words · 1 minute read

A categorization of the stability of software in open source projects.

These levels are intended to be used as a guideline by users considering to take on dependencies in their own projects.

_	Level	Description	Use in Production	Typical Versioning*
1	Experimental	proof-of-concept, demo, no public releases	not recommended	No Release
2	Soft	enough features are there to make it useful, but breaking changes are likely to happen	only if willing to contribute to the project	0.x
3	Firm	mostly feature-complete, possible to use in production, breaking changes can happen	recommended if willing to upgrade and adapt to changes	0.x
4	Hard	feature-complete, recommended for use in production, breaking changes very rare and migration paths planned	recommended	>= 1.0

*: if using semantic versioning

Markdown 🔗

Copy these snippets if you want to add stability badges to any markdown file.

[![stability: experimental](https://img.shields.io/badge/stability-experimental-brown)](https://www.crashbox.io/stability.html)
[![stability: soft](https://img.shields.io/badge/stability-soft-white)](https://www.crashbox.io/stability.html)
[![stability: firm](https://img.shields.io/badge/stability-firm-silver)](https://www.crashbox.io/stability.html)
[![stability: hard](https://img.shields.io/badge/stability-hard-gold)](https://www.crashbox.io/stability.html)

practices