A genetic algorithm approach to release planning in agile environment

Agile software development methodology, got importance in recent years. The agile philosophy promotes incremental and iterative design and implementation. Each iterations, delivers one or more product features. Release planning is a main activity in any of Agile approach. Main factors that need to be considered are the technical precedence inherent in the requirements; the feature's business value perceived by project stake holders, team capacity and required effort to complete the requirement. There are multiple tools available in industry to manage project but they are lacking to provide planning while considering all these factors. Genetic algorithms (GA) have arisen from concepts, introduced from the natural process of biological evolution. GA uses selection, crossover and mutation to evolve a solution to the given problem. In this paper an attempt has been made to formalize the release planning. Then an approach is proposed to do Release planning using genetic algorithms.