Milestones
The JDK 8 development schedule was divided into a sequence of milestone cycles, most six to eight weeks in length, with builds occuring roughly once each week. There were no formal beta or early-access releases. Major features and other potentially-destabilizing changes were targeted for integration early in a specific milestone.
Here is the milestone schedule, with the features integrated in each cycle:
Milestone definitions
The early development milestones (M1–M6) were date-driven; they came and went regardless of the state of the release. Most later milestones are condition-driven; we intended to reach the goal of the milestone by the given date, but if we didn't then we declared the milestone at a later date and adjusted any following milestones as necessary. Here are definitions of the later milestones, in the order in which they occur:
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Feature Complete — All features have been implemented and integrated into the master forest, together with unit tests.
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Developer Preview — A reasonably stable build suitable for broad testing by the developer community is published. This build will include all planned features unless otherwise stated.
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All Tests Run — All planned tests have been run, at least once, on all supported platforms.
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Rampdown — Phases in which increasing levels of scrutiny are applied to incoming changes. In phase 1, only P1-P3 bugs can be fixed. In phase 2 only showstopper bugs can be fixed.
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API/Interface Freeze — After this point APIs and other interfaces, including those defined in component JSRs, can be changed only in order to fix showstopper bugs.
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Zero Bug Bounce (ZBB) — The bug backlog is completely addressed. No open bug with a fix targeted to the release is older than 24 hours, and other bugs have been deferred to a future release.
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Final Release Candidate — The date by which the final release candidate must be declared and submitted for testing. One or more release candidates will be declared after the planned ZBB date; if another is necessary after this milestone then the GA date will be at risk.
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General Availability — Final release, ready for production use.
