Strategic Release Planning Challenges for Global Information Systems – A Position Paper

In global companies there is a shift from local to global information systems that need to satisfy the needs of many different divisions all over the world. This raises particular problems for strategic release planning, as the succession of releases needs to satisfy multiple business strategies of several countries. Identification of large-scale business aspect similarities, and thus synergies between these strategies, is a strong contributor to success. Features are a common way to represent early requirements or requirement bundles during strategic release planning. Planning global features requires a particular process regarding capturing and selection validation. The goal of this paper is to present challenges for strategic release planning of global information systems gathered from an industrial company in the health care domain. A preliminary literature review investigates to what extent these challenges are already recognized or solved in academia.