Theme-Based Product Release Planning: An Analytical Approach

Release planning is part of iterative software development and strongly impacts the success of a product by providing a roadmap for future releases. As such, it is of key importance for lean and agile organizations. Often features are highly dependent on each other and the value of a release is influenced by a set of bundled features constituting a theme. This paper addresses the topic of theme-based release planning. Themes might be defined, manually, upfront or as the result of computer-based analysis. In this paper, we propose an analytical approach to detect themes from a given set of feature dependencies. On top of an existing release planning methodology called EVOLVE II, our approach applies clustering performed on a feature dependency graph. The release plans generated from such an approach are a balance between two goals: (i) considering the values of individual features, (ii) detecting and utilizing synergy effects between semantically related features. As a proof-of-concept, we present a case study addressing the theme-based release planning for 50 features of a text processing system. The preliminary evaluation results show improved release plans with regards to accommodating themes.