Golden master

Golden master, or GM, is used to identify software that is close to the end of its development cycle. After the beta testing stage, a golden master is seeded to developers to confirm the absence of significant bugs before it is released to manufacturing or commercial distribution.

A golden master may be preceded as a release candidate (RC), referred to as going "silver", 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.