Release Planning through Functional Architecture

Abstract

Product software companies sell a standardized software product to a large market. Since a high number of customers use the product, product software companies cope with large numbers of requirements for the product they sell. One of the main activities of the software product manager is to select a subset of these incoming requirements, that will be developed in the next coming release. Therefore, software product managers must constantly balance between the highest customer satisfaction and the available development capacity within the firm. A recent study on the Functional Architecture Framework (a framework for functional decomposition of a software product into functional components) provides software product managers with a formal method to identify and organize these large volumes of incoming requirements by functional component. But this is still a partial solution to the release planning problem. In this research, a product software release planning method is presented which builds on the requirements management method of the Functional Architecture Framework, so a single method is created to manage the process from incoming requirement to planned release. For this method, different prioritization methods, cost estimation methods, and planning algorithms are studied, evaluated , adapted and combined which resulted in a method that uses linear optimization for product software release planning. The release planning method is eventually validated at a large product software company, by applying it on their release planning process.