No, they're not. Is IntelliJ "doing it wrong" to release every three months[1] ? Absolutely not. A release can change things about a product, and you want to

No, they're not. Is IntelliJ "doing it wrong" to release every three months[1] ? Absolutely not. A release can change things about a product, and you want to ensure you are pushing those changes (UI, behavior, plugin APIs) at a pace that matches the users. You don't want to be pushing changes to a plugin API every day. The surface area of stability that has to be maintained at that point is insane. In the interim, you should definitely be able to build off master. Your CICD server should build and run tests on every commit to master. Then a release gets a tag in version control and you should be able to issue bug fix releases for only that specific version. Telling customers, "There is a critical security bug in version X, but in order to fix that bug you need to upgrade completely to version X+2" is not an acceptable answer. Note that the description above works best in my experience for products that push a release artifact (like IntelliJ) versus a service like GitHub. Release management approaches will vary based on the product. [1] https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/previous.html https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/previous.html