Software release planning challenges in software development: An empirical study

Software development is a complicated process and requires careful planning to produce high quality software. In large software development projects, release planning may involve a lot of unique challenges. Due to time, budget and some other constraints, potentially there are many problems that may possibly occur. Subsequently, project managers have been trying to identify and understand release planning, challenges and possible resolutions which might help them in developing more effective and successful software products. This paper presents the findings from an empirical study which investigates release planning challenges. It takes a qualitative approach using interviews and observations with practitioners and project managers at five large software banking projects in Informatics Services Corporation (ISC) in Iran. The main objective of this study is to explore and increase the understanding of software release planning challenges in several software companies in a developing country. A number of challenges were elaborated and discussed in this study within the domain of software banking projects. These major challenges are classified into two main categories: the human-originated including people cooperation, disciplines and abilities; and the system-oriented including systematic approaches, resource constraints, complexity, and interdependency among the systems.