Software Release Planning

One of the most critical activities in software product development is the decisional process that assigns features to subsequent releases under technical, resource, risk, and budget constraints. This decision-centric process is referred to as software release planning (SRP).This briefing will expose a state of the art on SRP. A survey of the most relevant approaches will be presented. Emphasis will be made on their applicability (concerning e.g. type of development process - being more predictive versus more adaptive, type of system - commercial, open source product or mobile app), tool support and degree of validation in industry. One of these approaches, EVOLVE, will be analysed in detail.

1. Introduction

One of the most critical activities in software product development is the decisional process that assigns features to subsequent releases under technical, resource, risk, and budget constraints. This decision-centric process is referred to as software release planning (SRP) [1]. It is connected to, and has inspired, various types of research (related to architecture, technical debt, etc.) and is of key importance for the success of software products(continuous delivery, DevOps).