Bi-objective release planning for evolving software systems

  • Authors:

  • Moshood Omolade Saliu;Guenther Ruhe

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada;University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the the 6th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

The release planning (RP) problem can be investigated from two dimensions -- what to release and when to release. We investigate the "what" to release decision in terms of which new features or change requests should be assigned and implemented in which releases of a software system. RP for evolving systems is challenging, because the new features might require changes to the existing system. A major drawback of existing RP methods is that, they do not consider the existing systems in making RP decisions. In this paper, we present a technique to detect coupling between features based on relatedness of the components that would implement the features. The components implementing the features are derived from change impact analysis. We integrate the results from feature coupling into a RP strategy that encourages the assignment of highly coupled features in the same release. This helps to avoid haphazard implementation of related features. We present a decision support approach that formulates the RP problem as a bi-objective optimization problem. Our Bi-Objective Release Planning for Evolving Systems (BORPES) is aimed at optimizing the value of release plans from both the business perspectives and the implementation perspectives. This paper presents BORPES in detail and reports on a proof-of-concept case study that investigates the applicability of the proposed approach. The bi-objective optimization offers a set of Pareto-optimal solutions.