Product Release Planning

Chapter 6

Evolve II: A Systematic Method for Planning Product Releases

6.1 Introduction

Product release planning is hard to do: It is hard to formulate, and once formulated, hard to solve. Many aspects influence the judgment of what constitutes a “good” release plan. Some of these aspects can be well defined, others are difficult to describe. The overall size of the decision problem becomes visible for a small problem with 20 features and looking three releases ahead of time. In this case, more than 10¹² release plan possibilities exist. Intuition alone is insufficient to handle this type of complexity. Instead, a systematic method is needed combining computational strength with the creativity of the human experts to design release plans ...