Long-Term Planning of Development Efforts by Roadmapping – A Model and Experiences from Small Software Companies

Success in the software product business requires timely release of new products and upgrades with proper quality and the right features. For this, a systematic approach for managing the contents, timing and roles of future product releases as well as the product architecture is needed. In practice, such an approach is often missing, especially in small companies, due to inexperience, unclear priorities, time-to-market pressures, or the lack of suitable process infra-structure. In this paper, we present a model to visualize product roadmaps developed together with three small software companies and experiences from its use. The model depicts release and development schedules, the composition of individual releases, services that require attention from the developers, changes to the underlying technology and the planned resource usage. We also present lessons learned from the case companies and outline directions for future research.