Perception-Based Software Release Planning

Release planning is a cornerstone of incremental software development. This paper proposes a novel framework that performs the prioritization aspect of the software release-planning process. The aim of this framework is to help software product managers to select the most promising requirements that will be implemented in the next release. Many variables affect release planning, including: The importance of requirements as perceived by the different stakeholders; decision weights of the stakeholders; the risk associated with each requirement as estimated by the development team; the effort needed to implement each requirement; the release size (the effort allocated to implement and deliver a software release); and the dependencies among requirements. We assume that there are no ambiguities in defining the dependencies among requirements. Also it is assumed that the estimation of the available effort is accurate. Because of human perception, such variables as importance, risk, and required effort have a hi...

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