VOL-3492 panic in rw-core.
error log, in case of agent.start() failure, uses nil reference of childDevice.

Change-Id: Ib6ab65b7a0ad6e8356f16f2977d72e0daf080816
(cherry picked from commit 23bd8c72e526400f25cfc6ebf1c13945c186ff90)
diff --git a/VERSION b/VERSION
index aedc15b..9cf22a4 100644
--- a/VERSION
+++ b/VERSION
@@ -1 +1 @@
-2.5.3
+2.5.4-dev