Open Data Products Governance model
  • Governance of Open Data Product Specification
  • Community Code of Conduct
  • Contributions
    • Contributing changes
    • Contributor Agreement
  • Decision-making processes
  • Specification
    • Versioning practices
    • Breaking changes
    • Releases
  • Organization
    • Roles and responsibilities
    • Strategy Group
    • Business Advisory Group
    • Technical Steering Committee
    • Joining as organization
    • Joining as individual
  • Design
  • Finance
  • Timeline of ODPS
Powered by GitBook
On this page
  • What is a breaking change and why it matters?
  • Examples of breaking changes
  • What isn’t a breaking change?

Was this helpful?

Edit on GitHub
  1. Specification

Breaking changes

Last updated 2 years ago

Was this helpful?

We also encourage you to get familiar with which is applied (with limitations) in the versioning.

What is a breaking change and why it matters?

One of the trickiest aspects of being a standard provider is managing change. On the one hand, you want to continually evolve your offering, adding new features, and improving old ones to maintain your competitive edge. Standards compete with each other just like any other entities. On the other hand, you know that continuity is paramount to your consumers, so changes should have minimal impact on existing solutions built of top of the standard

In any case, something you definitely want to watch out for is breaking change, which can cause your consumer's applications to fail.

Examples of breaking changes

  • change of attribute type or renaming or removing existing options for content

  • removing mandatory element or attribute

  • moving existing attribute under a different existing element

  • renaming mandatory element or attribute

What isn’t a breaking change?

  • Adding a non-mandatory attribute or element

  • Changing attribute description

https://semver.org/