Planning for Optimized Product Releases

Speaker:	Dr. Guenther RUHE
		Industrial Research Chair in Software Engineering
		University of Calgary

Title:		"Planning for Optimized Product Releases"

Date:		Monday, 20 April 2009

Time:		4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theater F
		(Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theater, near lifts 25/26)
		HKUST

Abstract:

The challenge of the product managers is to make release decisions in
consideration of time-to-market, customer satisfaction, customer
dissatisfaction, competitiveness and risk. Under the pressure of time,
size and complexity, the decision is often done ad hoc, mainly relying on
intuition and experience. Release planning is the critical decision
process of deciding which features are implemented in which releases. From
a set of features, a selection and sequencing task needs to be performed.
In reality, the set of features is dynamically updated because new
features continually arrive and other (existing) features need to be
updated.

In this talk, we outline a hybrid planning approach integrating the
strength of computational intelligence with the knowledge and experience
of human experts. Besides planning on a strategic level, we look into the
follow-up problems of re-planning as well as the operational staffing of
human resources for the next release. For the latter, a focused search
approach and its application in t real-world case study are reported.


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Biography:

Dr. Guenther Ruhe (http://sern.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~ruhe/) received a
doctorate rer. nat degree in Mathematics with emphasis on Operations
Research from Freiberg University, Germany and a doctorate habil. nat.
degree from both the Technical University of Leipzig and University of
Kaiserslautern, Germany. He got an Alexander von Humboldt research
fellowship at University of Kaiserslautern in 1992. Ruhe was visiting
scientist at the IBM Research Centre in Heidelberg in 1993. From 1996
until 2001 he was deputy director of the Fraunhofer Institute for
Experimental Software Engineering in Germany.

Guenther Ruhe holds an Industrial Research Chair in Software Engineering at
the University of Calgary. His main results and publications are in
software engineering decision support, software release planning, software
project management. His interdisciplinary research includes mathematical
optimization, software measurement, simulation and empirical methods. Dr.
Ruhe has organized different international conferences and workshops, has
given keynotes at various conferences and is a reviewer for a variety of
journals in software engineering, computer science and operations
research. He has published more than 160 reviewed research papers at
journals, workshops and conferences. He is the Associate Editor of the IST
journal, a member of the Editorial Board of a number of journals. He holds
the position of a TRLabs Scientist and is a member of the ACM, the IEEE
Computer Society, and the Informatics Society German GI.