1. Purpose and scope
Customers cannot use production parts without production software. The purpose of this stage is to release, in one controlled step, everything a customer needs to build and ship a product on the chip: images signed with production keys, the production SDK and reference software, release notes and known issues, the developer documentation and porting guides, the software bill of materials and licence compliance report, and an update delivery service able to reach deployed devices from the first day.
Nothing new is developed here. The release candidate was frozen at Software validation sign-off, and the work of this stage is to sign it, package it, document it and approve it without changing what was validated. Any change to the code after sign-off sends the candidate back through the regression. The stage also sets the versioning and branching model and the software bill of materials format, because every later maintenance release follows them.
In scope: production signing of images and boot loaders, the production SDK and reference software, release notes, developer documentation and porting guides, the evaluation kit, the software bill of materials and licence compliance report, the update delivery service, the release approval record and the release itself. Out of scope: further defect fixing, which belongs to Software Validation & Compliance or, after release, to Maintenance, Updates & Vulnerability Response.
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