Dietmar Pfahl, Ahmed Al-Emran, Günther Ruhe

Release planning for incremental software development assigns features to releases such that most important technical, resource, risk and budget constraints are met. The research presented in this paper is an element of a three-staged procedure. In addition to an existing method for (i) strategic release planning that maps requirements to subsequent releases and (ii) a more fine-grained planning that defines resource allocations for each individual release, we propose a third step, i.e. (iii) stability analysis, which analyzes fine-grained plans of individual releases with regard to their sensitivity to planning errors. Planning errors can relate to alterations in expected personnel availability and productivity, feature and task-specific work volume, and degree of task dependency. The focus of this article is on stability analysis of proposed release plans. We present the simulation model Release Plan Simulator, Version 1 (REPSIM-1) and illustrate its usefulness for stability analyses with the help of a case example.