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An Exact Solution Approach for Release Planning of Software Product Lines  

Yoo, Jae-Wook (Department of Business Administration, Dong-A University)
Publication Information
Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering / v.35, no.2, 2012 , pp. 57-63 More about this Journal
Abstract
Software release planning model of software product lines was formulated as a precedence-constrained multiple 0-1 knapsack problem. The purpose of the model was to maximize the total profit of an entire set of selected features in a software product line over a multi-release planning horizon. The solution approach is a dynamic programming procedure. Feasible solutions at each stage in dynamic programming are determined by using backward dynamic programming approach while dynamic programming for multi-release planning is forward approach. The pre-processing procedure with a heuristic and reduction algorithm was applied to the single-release problems corresponding to each stage in multi-release dynamic programming in order to reduce the problem size. The heuristic algorithm is used to find a lower bound to the problem. The reduction method makes use of the lower bound to fix a number of variables at either 0 or 1. Then the reduced problem can be solved easily by the dynamic programming approaches. These procedures keep on going until release t = T. A numerical example was developed to show how well the solution procedures in this research works on it. Future work in this area could include the development of a heuristic to obtain lower bounds closer to the optimal solution to the model in this article, as well as computational test of the heuristic algorithm and the exact solution approach developed in this paper. Also, more constraints reflecting the characteristics of software product lines may be added to the model. For instance, other resources such as multiple teams, each developing one product or a platform in a software product line could be added to the model.
Keywords
Release Planning; Software Product Lines; Dynamic Programming; Precedence-Constrained Multiple 0-1 Knapsack Problem;
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