Review and Analysis of Software Release . . .

Software maintenance is generally recognized to consume majority of resources in many organizations. Regular replacement of legacy systems with new ones is not a feasible solution. Planning releases so as to maximize the functionality and quality of software is very much in need now. Release Planning plays a very important role in managing and maintaining releases and helps in the delivery of a high quality product to the end-users. Software Release planning involves proper grouping of activities in the release of one or more versions of software to one or more customers. This paper analyzes the various release planning models and the factors considered by these models for feature selection. 32 release planning models are considered and taxonomy of requirement selection factors is constructed. The main contribution of this paper is to assist software engineers in finding out the real factors that need to be considered in planning a release and to assess the effect of these identified factors on a release so as to plan releases efficiently and effectively