The 16.12 release cycle starts in October 2016.

Milestone Date
Start of release cycle 2016-10-03
Soft feature freeze: end of feature proposal and review period 2016-11-16
Hard feature freeze: end of feature development for this release 2016-11-30
Release candidate 1 (RC1)/hard code freeze: no new code changes may be made after this date 2016-12-13 EOD
RC1 testing 2016-12-14/2016-12-15
16.12 release 2016-12-16

If the release candidate 1 does not successfully pass all required tests, then the issues will be fixed and a new release candidate will be re-tested. This would delay the release, which would be reflected on this page.

See also