Release readiness measurement: a comparison of best practices

A crucial part of software project management consists of deciding when the software in development is ready to be released. We call this property of a software system release readiness. This work clarifies the meaning of release readiness by giving a presentation of three selected approaches which measure this property. This work distinguishes these approaches according to the criteria which they use to determine the release readiness: (1) Defect tracking uses the number and distribution of discovered defects inside the software for estimating release readiness. (2) The Software Readiness Index (SRI) makes use of quality and reliability metrics in order to determine release readiness. (3) ShipIt describes an elaborate measurement for release readiness which uses the development progress of the software product as an underlying metric A comparison between these three approaches shows that defect tracking is simple but limited in its application while ShipIt comes to short in measuring the important criteria of quality and reliability. Finally, SRI renders to be the most versatile and detailed approach for release readiness measurement.