Release Planning in Industry: Interview Data

Release planning can be seen as company-wide optimization problem involving many stakeholders where the goal is to maximize utilization of the often limited resources of a company and turn them into business benefit. The release planning results in a decision ofwhat to include in future release(s) of a product. In making this decisionone needs to consider how to make a product profitable both in the short- and long-term. As input to release planning are a set of {em needs} that, when realized into a product, provides some business/customer value. Normally the cost of implementing all of the proposed needs is larger than the budget allocated to a release, therefore a decision needs to be made of what to include in a release and what to post-pone. Thus, the set of needs needs to be prioritized in order to maximize business value of the needs included in a release.This report documents interview data resulting from multiple case study investigating how release planning is performed in industry today. In a sense it captures state-of-the-practice for release planning.