Document Versioning on Projects

Document versioning is important on projects. You can not always rely on the date to reflect the relevancy or freshness of the document because these dates are often driven by macros in office software which really just show when the document was last accessed, printed, or saved. A conscious decision by the author to change the version number of the document is always a better indicator than the date. The following rules are intended to help standardize the versioning process and eliminate some of the confusion.

1. Never use the word Final to describe a document. Ever.


2. New documents always begin with 0.0 and build to a major release.




• In the first phase, documents should be versioned with 0.1, 0.2, 0.3,
  etc…


• Phase 1 ends with version 1.0


• Phase 2 documents that build on phase 1 document are numbered 1.1,
  1.2, 1.3… and so on.


3. Existing documents that already exist when you start the project
   build on the existing numbers in the same way.



4. Even when you start over and redo something from scratch, keep the version
   numbers building.