Decision Support for Re-planning of Software Product Releases

摘要

In presence of ongoing change, re-planning of software release plans aims at making the plan a better fit with changing reality. Re-planning is potentially as complex as the original planning. Decisions to be made in this context are about when the re-planning should happen and which features should potentially be eliminated, added or replaced. This paper presents a decision support approach which combines the strengths of analytical methods with the intuition of human experts. Inspired by the idea of software process control, the approach assumes continuous monitoring of the amount of functionality implemented, the consumed effort, and the number of defects detected and corrected. The actual performance is compared with the planned one. In case of above-threshold deviation, a replanning analysis is initiated for how to react in a best way on the changed situation. The decision support framework has been instantiated by existing methods for generating optimized roadmaps and their operationalization. The result is an operational method called Dyna-H2W. The method has been applied in a case study investigating the planning and re-planning for 50 features of a commercial word-processing software product. The results initially confirm the hypothesis that Dyna-H2W helps to create more valuable products.