Towards Comprehensive Release Planning for Software Product Lines

Release Planning (RP) plays an important role for the success of incremental product development. Proper planning includes consideration of stakeholder preferences, resources and their capacities, as well as product and business objectives. The complexity of this process is getting even larger when looking for releases of software product lines (SPL). SPL is considered as a viable and important software development paradigm allowing companies under certain conditions to realize order-of-magnitude improvements in time to market, cost, productivity, quality, and other business drivers. In this paper, we present ongoing research in the process to develop a comprehensive and formalized model for planning and optimizing releases for SPL. We have identified key issues that are unique to RP of SPL. Some of them are highlighted by an example modified from literature for illustrative purposes.