Software Product Release Planning

Question 1

What is release planning?

Answer 1

• Incremental software development
• Set of competing features to be implemented.
• Stakeholder prioritize in terms of urgency and value
• Release cycle time can be predefined or can be open.
• Limited resources and budget.
• Release: Set of features constituting the next version of the product
• Release is refined into incremements (strategic vs. operational planning)
• Poor release planning makes project success mroe unlikely
• Comprehensive and sound release planning resutls in more reliable plans, better customer satisfaction, and more efficient usage of short resource (= maximum value)

Question 2

What is Feature Classification?

Answer 2

Software Product Feature = set of logically related requirements that provide a capability to the user and enable the satisfaction of business objectives.

Question 3

Feature Categorization Scheme

Answer 3

• State (Candiate/Approaved/…/Released)
• ID
• Submitter
• Company
• Domain
• Description
• Contract
• Priorities
• Motivation
• Line of business
• Specification
• Dependencies
• Resource Estimation
• Cost Estimation
• Schedule
• Design
• Test
• Release Version

Question 4

Art of release planning

Answer 4

Focus on human intuition and communication

• Pro: Flexible, easy to perform, ability tohandle soft and implicit concerns
• Con: Effectiveness and efficiency for mid-size and large scale problems, not transparent and not repeatable, re-planning is not supported, stakeholder involvement limited, resource consumption hard to take into account.

Question 5

Science of release planning

Answer 5

Emphasis on formalization of the problem and application of computational algorithms to generate best solutions

• Pro: Effective and efficient, easy re-planning, transparent, repeatable, comprehensive stakeholder involvement possible, resource consumption part of the solution procedure.
• Con: Needs formal description of the problem, needs computer support.

Question 6

What is planning on the fly?

Answer 6

• Informal process
• Informal decisions
• Resource situation ignored
• Stakeholders left out.

Question 7

Criteria for feature selection

Answer 7

• Customer satisfaction
• Customer dissatisfaction
• Risk of implementation
• Risk of acceptance
• Financial value
• Cost
• Time to market
• Volatility
• Frequency of use
• Easy of use

Question 8

Release Planning Process

Answer 8

1. Feature eliciation
2. Problem specification
3. Resource estimation
4. Stakeholder voting
5. Release plan generation
6. Evalutation of plan alternatives
7. Implementation