Release Planning of Software Systems: a Decision Support Approach

Large software systems evolve because of the need toextend their functionality by adding new features ormodifying existing ones. Release planning for suchsystems can be extremely challenging. There are bothbusiness and technical perspectives to thischallenge. From a business perspective, new featurerequests originate from stakeholders with diverse(and often conflicting) business interests, who allwant their needs to be met, in spite of resource, schedule and other project constraints. From atechnical perspective, incorporating a new featureinto an existing software system, without breakingold features, can be a tough balancing act. This bookdiscusses a novel and rigorous decision supporttechnique known as SoRPES that addresses these twoperspectives. The work provides a theoreticalfoundation for, and a novel formulation of, releaseplanning as a multi-objective optimization problem. Using results from empirical validation studiesconducted on real-world projects, the book presentssoftware practitioners with a useful tool togenerate release plans that are often more optimaland more practical than could be obtained by existingtechniques.