The challenge of release planning

Size and complexity of today's software products are continuously growing. This has made it increasingly difficult to decide which features shall be implemented in a product's next version. Consequently, release planning, the process of planning for the next release of an evolving product has been recognized as a wicked problem. Existing studies on wicked problems suggest that it would be too simple to deal with them with intelligence gathering, linear thinking and rational decision making. Yet, it appears that this is precisely how many companies are currently trying to plan their forthcoming product releases. Although the characteristics of release planning challenges are visible and documented in the literature, is this challenge really seen? This paper reviews existing release planning practices introduced in the literature in order to understand the underlying assumptions they have been built on. The identified assumptions are then compared with reported release planning characteristics. As a result, the paper identifies the gap between the problem characteristics and the current solutions, and outlines conditions for more adequate release planning approaches to deal with release planning as complex wicked problems.