Software Release Life Cycle
By no means this is something official and should be taken with a grain of salt and every company have its own adapted process and some do all of these steps in a matter of days or even hours especially for web applications
Alpha: Planning, analysis, development, unit testing, quality testing, and value assurance. Still might be unstable and have serious bugs. Software is still inside the organization and it may not contain all features planned for the final release. The phase ends with a feature freeze when all is done and ready for thorough beta testing.
Beta: Can be available publically. Usability testing is done at this stage and more bugs are closed. Closing major bugs or blockers.
Release Candidate: All features are completed and no more features need to be added for the stable release. Documentation is done.
Stable Release: Production release and marks the latest release candidate as done.
Support: Includes patches and service packs for version maintenance, enhancements, and fixes
End-of-life: When it’s deprecated and no longer supported but might still be used by customers
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