How do you handle multiple release candidate versions in Jira?

Question

Let's say I'd like to ship a new version of my software 1.2.

I start doing a release candidate Version "1.2_RC1" in Jira.

While testing the version, issues have been found so we need to fix them and try a second release candidate to get version 1.2 out the door: "1.2_RC2".

This happens again and we have "1.2_RC3".

Now finally the third release candidate was ok and gets shipped.

Now I do have tickets that have a fixVersion for 1.2_RC1 and others for 1.2_RC2 and some for 1.2_RC3.

But I can only create Release Notes in JIRA for one version.

How does everybody handle this? Merge all release candidates into one final release? Or create release notes for all RC versions and manually put them together?

Atlassian is using release candidates in version numbers. How do you handle this?

Kassenaerztliche Bundesvereinigung · Answer

Cool. Sounds like a good solution. Didn't think of the possibility to set multiple fixVersions. Thanks!

Tiago Machado · Answer

I handle it with multiple fixVersion values.

Before the release start, we have all the stories/tasks set the fixVersion to 1.2

Then a first release is done and we add the fixVersion 1.2_RC1

Then a given issue was found (affectedVersion =1.2_RC1) and fixed on 1.2_RC2 (fixVersion = 1.2 1.2_RC2)

Finally the release is ready and shipped.

After it is shipped, we don't care anymore how many RC's we had. Now you can merge all the RC versions into the main one (1.2)

This way, we are able to control the development with the release candidates, keep the history and avoid too much release pollution.