RELREA - An Analytical Approach for Evaluating Release Readiness

As part of incremental and iterative software development, decisions about “Is the software product ready to be released at some given release date?” have to be made at the end of each release, sprint or iteration. While this decision is critically important, so far it is largely done either informally or in a simplistic manner, relying on a small set of isolated metrics. In this paper, we present an analytical approach combining the goal-oriented definition of the most relevant readiness metrics with their individual evaluation and their subsequent analytical integration into an aggregated evaluation measure. The applicability of the proposed approach called RELREA is demonstrated for an ongoing public project hosted on GitHub, a web-based hosting service for software development projects. Initial evidence shows that the method is supportive in evaluating release readiness at any point of the development cycle, making projections on the final release readiness and allows determination of bottleneck factors to achieve readiness. Keywords-release date; release readiness; release criteria; fuzzy set; aggregation; case study