Releasing sooner or later: an optimization approach and its case study evaluation

Decisions about the release date need to balance between the degree of readiness (quality) of the product and the potential competitive advantage and added value of (early) delivery. Based on an existing optimization approach for solving the maximum value release planning problem for a fixed release time, we provide a re-optimization approach for which includes local and global re-planning exchange operations to determine the outcome of varying the release dates. The proposed method determines a set of trade-off solutions related to (i) the value of the features implemented, (ii) their estimated quality, and (iii) the release time. The approach is evaluated by a real-world case study taken from an ongoing project which is to develop the new main release 2.0 for the release planning decision support platform ReleasePlanner™ v1.6.