The how? when? and what? for the process of re-planning for product releases

Abstract

Volatility of features and dynamic change in stakeholders' needs often requires re-planning of an existing release plan to accommodate changes. H2W is a re-planning method that answers the questions of how, when, and what to re-plan of an existing product release strategy. For HOW, a greedy heuristic based on prioritization of candidate features is applied. A value-based replanning approach is proposed for the WHEN question. For WHAT, a trade-off analysis between the degree of change related to the originally announced release plan and the improvement achievable by replacing existing features with more attractive ones is suggested. At each of the re-planning iterations, H2W either provides a new improved plan or states that an improvement does not exist. As a proof-of-concept, a case study is conducted. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.