Our ad hoc system on the last big product I worked on was roughly: A.B.C A is a big major release, a significant step forward in terms of how you interact with

Our ad hoc system on the last big product I worked on was roughly: A.B.C A is a big major release, a significant step forward in terms of how you interact with the product - the difference between 1.b.c and 2.b.c should be fairly apparent. B is for Breaking changes within a release - if it used to work one way in a.1.c, you shouldn’t rely on it working the same way in a.2.c C is for non-breaking new features and bug fixes - if you’ve been using a.b.1, it should be totally safe to switch to a.b.2 Not sure if that was the best approach, but it’s sort of what we settled on organically and nobody complained so It helped that our users were mostly our client’s counterpart developers, so they were pretty looped into our release cycle anyway.