A Feature Partitioning Method for Distributed Agile Release Planning

Agile software development represents a major approach that has gained increasing popularity in recent years. Economy forces agile organizations to overcome geographical distances to benefit from accessing a larger resource pool and to reduce development costs. However, agile and distributed development approaches differ significantly in their key tenets. While agile methods mainly rely on informal processes to facilitate coordination, distributed development typically relies on formal mechanisms. To address this situation, we present a distributed agile release planning approach to assist the release planning process of distributed agile development teams by identifying feature chunks that can be implemented co-located to minimize the communication needs between dispersed teams. The presented method demonstrates how this approach 1) necessitates less intensive communication and coordination, 2) can provide better utilization of resources, and 3) can produce higher quality feature distribution plans. Finally, the paper analyzes benefits and issues from the use of this approach.