Intelligent support for software release planning

One of the most prominent issues involved in incremental software development is to decide upon the most appropriate software release plans taking into account all explicit and implicit objectives and constraints. Such decisions have become even more complicated in the presence of large number of stakeholders such as different groups of users, managers, or developers. However, early involvement of customers and understanding of their real needs is one of the core success factors of software business [ 16]. This paper introduces a six step process model for release planning. It is inspired by the Quality Improvement Paradigm [2], as release planning is a learning and improvement process as well. Emphasis is on proposing the tool support implementing this process. The use of the intelligent decision support tool ReleasePlanner(TM) is presented by comparing a baseline scenario reflecting current state-of-the practice of release planning with a supposed improvement scenario obtained after usage of the tool. Initial experience from a real-world environment at iGrafx Corel Inc. is used to validate the improvement scenario.