Next Release Problem: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Agile software development is a widely used software development methodology which welcomes highly changing customers’ requirements. In Agile software development process, the whole software is delivered into a series of small releases. Each release incorporates a subset of whole software requirements. The selection of requirements to be incorporated in the next release is a complex activity. It was first termed as “Next Release Problem” by Bagnal. Many techniques were proposed later on to solve NRP The main objectives of this research are: (1) to classify NRP papers according to four criteria: techniques used, datasets used, objectives (either single or multiple), publication channels and trends; and (2) to analyze these studies from three perspectives: study objectives, optimization techniques to solve NRP and limitations of study. We performed a systematic literature review on NRP studies published in the period 2010-2018 and reviewed them on an automated four electronic databases. We identified a total of 27 studies published between 2010 and 2018 and classified them on predefined classification criteria. Based on the findings of this research it is concluded that multi-objective optimization techniques are the most widely used techniques. Among multiobjective optimization techniques applied in the context of NRP, NSGA-II provides the best solution both in term of convergence speed and solution quality while for the single-objective optimization problem, Simulated Annealing provides promising results. It is also observed that customer’s satisfaction is widely used objectives to be maximized in either single objective or multi-objective optimization techniques. Furthermore, 10 real-world datasets were identified during this research. It is observed that the latest optimization techniques are given less attention to solving NRP which have shown promising results in many cases as compared to techniques applied to cater NRP.