Decision support for release planning of software systems

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dc.contributor.advisorRuhe, Guenther
dc.contributor.authorSaliu, Moshood Omolade
dc.date.accessioned2017-12-18T21:35:20Z
dc.date.available2017-12-18T21:35:20Z
dc.date.issued2007
dc.descriptionBibliography: p. 223-243en
dc.descriptionSome pages are in colour.en
dc.description.abstractLarge software systems sometimes evolve because of the need to extend their functionality with new or changed features. Release planning for such systems can be extremely challenging. There are both business and technical perspectives to this challenge. From a business perspective, new feature requests originate from stakeholders with diverse (and often conflicting) business interests and all want their needs to be met, in spite of resource, schedule and other project constraints. From a technical perspective, incorporating a new feature into an existing system, without breaking old features, can be a tough balancing act. It remains an open problem how to best make release planning decisions that address these two perspectives. In this dissertation, we investigate this problem and conduct a detailed analysis of these two perspectives. Then, we propose and validate a novel and rigorous decision support technique known as SoRPES (Software Release EJanning with Existing System-awareness). In SoRPES, we formulate release planning as a bi-objective optimization problem that takes advantage of the interrelatedness of features as the first of two optimization objectives. The second optimization objective aims to assign features to releases in a way that maximizes the priorities that stakeholders specify for the features. As part of SoRPES, we have developed, validated, and used EBEAM (Expert- Based Evaluation of Architectures for Modifiability), a framework for evaluating software architectural designs for modifiability, as a part of our metric suite for assessing the technical constraints of implementing features in the existing system. The key contributions of this research consist of the following 6 elements: 1) a decision-centric framework for release planning that addresses both business and technical concerns; 2) an expert judgment-based technique for evaluating modifiability of architectural designs; 3) a technique for quantifying the interrelatedness of features using impact analysis data; 4) a theoretical foundation for, and a novel formulation of, release planning as a multi-objective optimization problem; 5) a proof-of-concept implementation of SoRPES; and 6) empirical validation studies to assess the feasibility, relevance, scalability, and consistency of SoRPES. The results from the empirical validation studies conducted on real-world projects strongly suggest practitioners would find SoRPES useful as a tool to generate release plans that are often more optimal and more practical than prior techniques.
dc.format.extentxxiv, 268 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm.en
dc.identifier.citationSaliu, M. O. (2007). Decision support for release planning of software systems (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/1817en_US
dc.identifier.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/1817
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1880/102818
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisher.institutionUniversity of Calgaryen
dc.publisher.placeCalgaryen
dc.rightsUniversity of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.
dc.titleDecision support for release planning of software systems
dc.typedoctoral thesis
thesis.degree.disciplineComputer Science
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Calgary
thesis.degree.nameDoctor of Philosophy (PhD)
ucalgary.item.requestcopytrue
ucalgary.thesis.accessionTheses Collection 58.002:Box 1751 520492268
ucalgary.thesis.notesUARCen
ucalgary.thesis.uarcreleaseyen
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