Strategic Release Planning and Evaluation of Operational Feasibility

Strategic planning (or road-mapping) of software releases addresses the assignment of requirements to releases on a strategic level. Effort, finance and risk constraints are considered to determine strategic release plans. The goal is to find an optimal balance between competing stakeholder priorities and bottleneck resources. However, strategic planning has to be supplemented by more fine-grained operational planning as typically performed in project management. The paper describes mechanisms by which to reduce the complexity of strategic and operational planning to a series of data and formulae that objectively represent input from all stakeholders and can easily reported, analyzed and manipulated. The capability provides improved planning and re-planning in a dynamic business environment, including the ability to validate strategic plans against operational limitations and revise as necessary. For performing strategic planning, we present the research prototype ReleasePlanner™. Real-world experience in performing strategic planning using ReleasePlanner is reported from a case study at Trema Laboratories Inc.