The art and science of software release planning

Incremental development provides customers with parts of a system early, so they receive both a sense of value and an opportunity to provide feedback early in the process. Each system release is thus a collection of features that the customer values. Furthermore, each release serves to fix defects detected in former product variants. Release planning (RP) addresses decisions related to selecting and assigning features to create a sequence of consecutive product releases that satisfies important technical, resource, budget, and risk constraints.