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

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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.