Tool support for software product and release planning - requirements and current solutions

Software product release planning is a common activity in software development organizations. The planning problem is complex and difficult, but supporting tools have only emerged in the last few years. This paper presents a number of common planning challenges based on literature as requirements for tool support, and then examines four software tools from the perspective of these challenges. The identified challenges are release planning process & repeatability, time horizons, stakeholder management, resource management, dependencies, prioritization, scoping, scenarios and risk management. These challenges and planning problems were taken into account in the examined software tools with varying approaches and success, and it seems that adequate tool support for the release planning problem exists. As future research should we recommend validating the identified release planning challenges based on industrial experience and prioritizing them from a practitioner perspective to help understand proper tool support for different contexts. .