Golden master

Golden master, or GM, is used to identify software that is near nearing 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 bugs are noted, before release to manufacturing (RTM), referred to as going "gold", in which the software is cleared for release.