Software Release Planning - SENG 607.25

JUSTIFICATION FOR THE COURSE:

Release planning is the process of defining the functionality of a sequence of product releases in incremental development. Product release planning relates to other well-established disciplines of (incremental) development:

•   requirements management, especially requirements prioritization,
•   project planning and management, and
•   change and configuration management.

This course studies methods, tools and techniques for planning and re-planning of software releases. Release planning is a very complex problem including different stakeholder perspectives, competing objectives and different types of constraints. Release planning is impacted by a huge number of inherent constraints. Most of the features are not independent from each other. Typically, there are precedence and/or coupling constraints between features that have to be satisfied. Furthermore, effort, resource, and budget constraints have to be fulfilled for each release. The overall goal is to find a relatively small set of the “most promising” release plans such that the overall value and the degree of satisfaction of all the different stakeholders are maximized. The topic of investigation is uncertain and incomplete in its nature.

SCOPE OF THE COURSEWORK:

Students will learn

• Modeling release planning as part of evolutionary problem solving
• Overview of key solution methods for systematic release planning
• Release planning method EVOLVE II and its implementation
• Skills to support planning by tools
• Understanding of the current state-of-the practice (from industrial case studies)
• Advanced topics complementing release planning

COURSE CONTENT:

1. Introduction and overview
2. Decisions, and how to make and support them
3. Features and their prioritization
4. Planning for product releases - Overview
5. Modeling for advanced release planning
6. EVOLVE II
7. Re-planning
8. Staffing for product releases
9. Release planning and Scrum
10. Planning for functional and non-functional requirements
11. Release planning in consideration of design constraints
12. Stability of release plans
13. Explanation of release planning results 

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