Software release planning for evolving systems.

Release planning is a crucial step in incremental software development. It addresses the issues involved with assigning features to sequence of releases of a system such that the most important technical, resource, risk and budget constraints are met. These problems are difficult to solve for even mid-sized systems. The issues become even more challenging in evolving systems where we need to consider the characteristics of the existing system, as the existing components of the system have their own history and status in terms of size, complexity, health, criticality, and understandability. In this paper, we present the foundations for handling release planning for evolving systems in a rigorous manner. Based on a formalized problem description, we present a new solution approach for release planning of evolving systems called S-EVOLVE*. From analyzing and comparing different characteristics of the target components, where new features will be implemented, we obtain a more detailed perspective of the potential impact of implementing one feature or another. As part of this analysis, we have applied the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to define weighting factors for component modifiability. The information gained is used for designing release plans based on thresholds for the relative extent of modifiability acceptable for a release. A set of structurally different release plans is generated based on solving a specialized integer linear-programming problem. The plans are proven to be semi-optimal for the stated objectives. A case study is performed to demonstrate the added value of the approach. The evolving system under consideration is the intelligent decision-support tool ReleasePlanner. We compare and discuss results, for planning future releases, for the cases with and without consideration of system constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]