Decision Support for Software Release Planning Using e-Assistants

The problem of assigning most appropriate requirements to a series of releases of a software system is difficult to solve due to uncertainty from several sources, for example, the preferences of different stakeholders. We present a solution to this problem by providing a flexible release planning procedure using a solution generation engine, ReleasePlanner®, and so-called e-assistants. In our iterated e-release planning process, e-assistants present to their human stakeholders solutions to variants of the problem instance. By selecting the best suited solutions, the stakeholders allow the e-assistants to elicit more and more their implicit preferences. To guarantee termination, in each round the assignment of some requirements to releases is fixed, based on analysing concordance and non-discordance of assignments between the preferred candidate solutions.

[1]  Christoph Bussler,et al.  Enterprise Application Integration , 2005, Encyclopedia of Database Technologies and Applications.

[2]  Thierry Marchant,et al.  Evaluation and Decision Models: A Critical Perspective , 2000 .

[3]  Jeffrey O. Kephart,et al.  MailCat: an intelligent assistant for organizing e-mail , 1999, AGENTS '99.

[4]  Claes Wohlin,et al.  The fundamental nature of requirements engineering activities as a decision-making process , 2003, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[5]  K. Beck,et al.  Extreme Programming Explained , 2002 .

[6]  Gunther Ruhe.  Software Engineering Decision Support: Methodology and Applications , 2003 .

[7]  Jeffrey S. Rosenschein,et al.  Rules of Encounter - Designing Conventions for Automated Negotiation among Computers , 1994 .

[8]  Björn Regnell,et al.  An industrial survey of requirements interdependencies in software product release planning , 2001, Proceedings Fifth IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering.

[9]  T. Saaty,et al.  The Analytic Hierarchy Process , 1985 .

[10]  Randall Davis,et al.  Negotiation as a Metaphor for Distributed Problem Solving , 1988, Artif. Intell..

[11]  Gary DeGregorio.  1 Enterprise-wide Requirements & Decision Management , 1999 .

[12]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Functionally Accurate, Cooperative Distributed Systems , 1988, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

[13]  M. Bohanec,et al.  The Analytic Hierarchy Process , 2004 .

[14]  Claes Wohlin,et al.  Requirements prioritisation: an experiment on exhaustive pair-wise comparisons versus planning game partitioning , 2004, ICSE 2004.

[15]  Yasuhiko Kitamura,et al.  Multiple character-agents interface: an information integration platform where multiple agents and human user collaborate , 2002, AAMAS '02.

[16]  Victor J. Rayward-Smith,et al.  The next release problem , 2001, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[17]  David A. Penny,et al.  An estimation-based management framework for enhancive maintenance in commercial software products , 2002, International Conference on Software Maintenance, 2002. Proceedings..

[18]  N. R. Jennings,et al.  To appear in: Int Journal of Group Decision and Negotiation GDN2000 Keynote Paper Automated Negotiation: Prospects, Methods and Challenges , 2022 .

[19]  Paul Compton,et al.  EMMA: an e-mail management assistant , 2003, IEEE/WIC International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology, 2003. IAT 2003..

[20]  Kwok Ching Tsui,et al.  The Intelligent Assistant: An Overview , 2000, Intelligent Systems and Soft Computing.

[21]  Günther Ruhe,et al.  Hybrid Intelligence in Software Release Planning , 2004, Int. J. Hybrid Intell. Syst..

[22]  Ho-Won Jung,et al.  Optimizing Value and Cost in Requirements Analysis , 1998, IEEE Softw..

[23]  Gary DeGregorio.  Enterprise-wide Requirements & Decision Management , 2000 .

[24]  Pär Carlshamre,et al.  Release Planning in Market-Driven Software Product Development: Provoking an Understanding , 2002, Requirements Engineering.