Detail

Beauty and the Beast – Software Release Planning is both

With the pervasiveness of iterative development, decisions are pervasive as well on when? and what? to release. The problem once has been classified to be “wicked”. Different models and related algorithms have been proposed over the years, being for single vs multi-objectives, next versus multiple releases, fixed versus flexible release dates as well as single versus multiple stakeholders involved. Beautiful models and related algorithms have been developed and partially evaluated, utilizing meta and more recently also hyper heuristics, as well as integer and logic programming.

How successful all this has been in reality? Software development technologies are changing fast, continuous delivery is becoming more and more reality, same as crowdsourced and open source development. The talk outlines recent achievements in research and real-world application of software release planning. The talk is intended to provoke discussion on the validity of models, the degree of real-world validation, the difficulty of feature elicitation, and the deficit in usage of tools. All that has been subsumed as the representing “the beast”. Finally, the talk outlines an agenda of future work on “taming the beast”.