Cognitive and Hierarchical Fuzzy Inference System for Generating Next Release Planning in SaaS Applications

The next release planning is considered as a cognitive decision-making problem where many stakeholders provide their judgments and opinions about the set of features that shall be included in the next release of the software. In multi-tenant Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, planning for the next release is a significant process that plays important roles in the success of SaaS applications. SaaS providers shall fulfill the evolving needs and requirements of their tenants by continuously delivering new releases. The first step in a release development lifecycle is the release planning process. This paper proposes a novel approach for the next release planning for multi-tenant SaaS applications. This approach is a prioritization approach that employs a hierarchical fuzzy inference system (HFIS) module to deal with the uncertainty associated with human judgments. The main objectives of the proposed approach are maximizing the degree of overall tenants’ satisfaction, maximizing the degree of commonality, and minimizing the potential risk, while considering contractual, effort, and dependencies constraints. The performance of the proposed approach is validated against a one from the literature and shows better results from the perspective of overall tenants’ satisfaction and adherence to the risk.