Ad Hoc Versus Systematic Planning of Software Releases - A Three-Staged Experiment

Release planning addresses the process of deciding which requirement of an evolving software system should be assigned to which release. We study two fundamentally different software release planning approaches: (i) ad hoc planning and (ii) systematic planning. Ad hoc planning is mainly based on human intuition, experience and communication. Systematic planning, based on formalization, assumes a quantitative description of the problem, and application of optimization algorithms for its solution. We have performed a controlled experiment intended to investigate hypotheses related to confidence, understanding, and trust related to the two approaches. The stated hypotheses were based on an explorative pre-study and prior industrial release planning projects. Although limited in scope and size, the experiment provided interesting insight into the performance of the stated approaches. Overall, systematic planning based on tool support increased confidence into the solutions and was trusted more than ad hoc planning.