Release candidate

Release candidate, or RC, is used to identify software that is nearing the end of its development cycle. After the beta testing stage, a release candidate is seeded to developers to confirm the absence of significant bugs before it is released to manufacturing or commercial distribution.

A release candidate, referred to as going "silver", is the stage in which the code is frozen and any remaining non-critical bugs are noted, before release to manufacturing (RTM), referred to as going "gold", in which the software is cleared for release.