Decision support for product release management under functional and non-functional requirements

发布决策处理产品生命周期的早期阶段。在本质上，发布计划是定义产品发布序列的功能的过程，作为增量开发的一部分。客户和利益相关者不断要求更多的功能或对现有功能进行修改。但是：下一个版本最终选择哪些版本，为什么？还有：哪些功能不够吸引人，最好不要（或推迟）？如何对客户的定制需求做出反应？ 传统上，发布计划关注于功能需求。对这一传统的两个基本延伸的研究是本建议的主要内容： (i)功能和非功能需求下的发布计划：实现新特性所需的工作需要与实现非功能需求的目标质量水平所需的工作进行平衡。 (ii)迭代开发中的垂直和水平产品发布计划：我们使用术语“垂直发布计划”来描述考虑资源，风险，技术，实现和业务约束的产品发布序列设计过程。我们所说的“水平规划”是指产品（主）版本的定制变体设计，同样考虑到硬约束和软约束。结果是定制的产品版本，通常在主版本中满足特定的客户需求。 这两个方向的研究是独立的，其后续整合的目标。各种类型的实证评估将有助于了解所提出的方法的可扩展性，有用性和可用性。

Release decisions address the early stage of a product's life-cycle. In its essence, release planning is the process of defining the functionality of a sequence of product releases as part of incremental development. Customers and stakeholders are continuously asking for more features or revision of existing ones. But: Which ones to finally select for the next release and why? And: Which features are not attractive enough and are better left out (or postponed)? How to react on specific customer needs for customizaation? Traditionally, release planning is focusing on functional requirements. Research towards two fundamental extensions of this tradition are the main content of this proposal: (i) Release planning under functional and non-functional requirements: The effort needed for implementing new features needs to be balanced against the effort needed to achieve stated target quality levels for non-functional requirements. (ii) Vertical and horizontal product release planning in iterative development: We use the term 'vertical release planning' for the process of designing a sequence of product releases in consideration of resource, risk, technological, implementation and business constraints. By 'horizontal planning' we mean the design for customized variants of (main) releases of a product, again in consideration of hard and soft constraints. The results are customized product versions, which typically address specific customer needs within a main release. The two directions are studied independently with the goal of their subsequent integration. Various types of empirical evaluation will help to understand the scalability, usefulness and usability of the proposed approaches.