Explaining Product Release Planning Results Using Concept Analysis

Objective: This paper aims to generate explanations from a series of data points obtained from a decision support system called ReleasePlanner for supporting product release planning and considered to be a black box. Method: Concept analysis is applied to 1085 data points received from running 10 scenarios of a real world product release planning project with 35 candidate solutions generated by ReleasePlanner. Results: Three main results are obtained: (1) patterns between inputs and outputs; (2) impact of individual input parameters on outputs; and (3) sensitivity level of outputs in dependence of inputs. Conclusion: Concept analysis is shown to be a feasible technique for gaining more insight into the structure of results obtained from a black box input-output system, such as, but not limited to, ReleasePlanner.

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