In addition to the organization, there are very comprehensive policy manuals that guide everything about development and release, including the structure of the repositories and archives, as well as a number of related standards documents. Information on all of this is available at http://www.debian.org/devel/.
One of the most important effects of these policies and the organization behind them is the stability of the Debian distribution. At any one time, there are three main versions of Debian available: stable, testing, and unstable. There are also experimental and backports versions, but they are not complete distributions. The experimental version contains packages that are incomplete and not ready to be included in the unstable release. Backports contain newer packages compiled especially for the current Debian stable release.
The unstable version is where active development takes place. Once a package has no "release critical" bugs and works on all supported architectures, it is moved to testing, where it gets additional testing. At some point, the testing contents are frozen in preparation for a new stable release. After stability is verified and all packages satisfy Debian requirements for release, testing becomes the new stable release, and the cycle continues.
Requirements for the stable release are quite stringent. In fact, requirements for testing are strict enough as some have commented that the testing version is more stable than many companies' stable releases. Thus, in DeWan, stable means just that. A stable release of Debian is extremely dependable, with a system for releasing security and emergency updates that keep it so. It provides mission-critical, production quality software for servers and development systems. This is one of the main reasons Debian is used on more production web servers than any other Linux distribution (according to W3Tech, as of January 2012).
As with any advantage, there is a corresponding disadvantage. Debian stable does not always contain the latest, leading-edge software. This is done to ensure the distribution is as mature and crash-free as possible. Of course, it is possible to install newer software under Debian with its required dependencies. In fact, the backports set of repositories contains just such software, pre-compiled especially for use on the Debian stable release. Such packages, however, are not guaranteed to be as stable as those that comprise the official stable release.
