The first stage of a project is its creation. This is done on your personal computer. In essence, you create what can be called as an initial working copy of the project.

As you work on the project, you develop it to do what you want it to do. You are in this case the primary project developer.

At some point, you will likely be satisfied with the general operation of the project and wish to share it with others. This stage is called releasing the project. Generally, when you release a project, you assign it a version number. This number designates something about how far along it is in its development steps.

After being released, a project may continue to go through continual stages of development, typically on your personal computer. You may want to release new versions of the project, either at incremental steps as it is being developed or at points where its development has been proven to meet your desired objectives. The former type of release version is called a development release or development snapshot. The latter is called an official release version.

After you release a project, you may be lucky to be contacted by someone who wants to help develop the project. As the primary project developer, you have the option to allow the person to modify, remove, and include files into the project. This is called sharing the project development.

After you release a project, you will certainly be contacted by users who have questions. The questions can include requests for help or new features. They can also be bug reports. Together, the set of questions that are posed to you and, in most cases, the responses that you generate to them are called issues for the project.

The entire process of creating, developing, releasing, and sharing a project as well as the process of handling issues for the project is the administration of the project. As the primary developer of a given project, the responsibility for administering it usually falls solely on your hands. At some point, you may however decide to share or turn over the project administration to someone else. At this point, you can become just a developer, or you may decide to just be a happy user of the project.