Generalized Release Planning for Product Line Architectures

This paper elaborates on the coordination and management of evolving software product-lines, where development teams work around a shared and reusable domain infrastructure. The trend away from monolithic applications and towards component-based, product-line architectures has enabled the development of complex software to be undertaken by autonomous and often, geographically separated teams. To deliver a complete product or product-line requires significant coordination to bring the separate development streams together, at agreed points in the schedule, for integration and test. In such complex development scenarios a Release Matrix has been proposed as a generalization of release planning and tracking, addressing multiple products, components and their inter-dependencies at an enterprise or marketplace level. Here we describe results from the practical trials of the Release Matrix that provide pragmatic guidelines for its use and indicate areas for future research. Relationships to established processes, including requirements engineering and configuration management, are clarified and the methodology neutral technique is shown to complement work in areas, including Agile Methods and component contracts.