Proactive and reactive decision support for handling change requests in software release planning.

摘要

Inevitable requirements volatility and dynamic changes in stakeholders' needs are two of the major threats to software projects success. This issue becomes more substantial when it comes to release planning as the most attractive features need to be assigned to the next release without violating constraints. In this research, the problem of Handling Change Requests in software release planning is addressed by a decision Support method, called Sup-HCR. Proactively, Sup-HCR provides decision support to address the modifiability concern when planning for the next release, in order to save future modification effort. Reactively, Sup-HCR provides decision support for software release re-planning, in order to accommodate change requests in the release plan. Our method includes an adapted approach for feature modeling and estimating features' impact on system modifiability, by applying object oriented design metrics to the feature domain. An initial evaluation of the methods is conducted by a real world case study.