Art and Science of System Release Planning

Abstract

Informed and qualified decisions are key factors for project failure or success. The idea of decision support always arises when timely decisions must be made in unstructured or semi-structured problem domains, where multiple stakeholders are involved, and when the information available is uncertain. Release planning (RP) addresses decisions related to the selection and assignment of features to a sequence of consecutive product releases such that the most important technical, resource, budget, and risk constraints are met. Release planning is an important and integral part of any type of incremental product development. The objective of this tutorial is to describe and position the ‘art and science’ of software release planning. The “art of release planning” refers to relying on human intuition, communication, and capabilities to negotiate between conflicting objectives and constraints. The “science of release planning” refers to emphasizing formalization of the problem and applying computational algorithms to generate best solutions. Both art and science are important for achieving meaningful release planning results. We investigate the release planning process and propose a hybrid planning approach that integrates the strength of computational intelligence with the knowledge and experience of human experts.