The next release problem

Companies developing and maintaining complex software systems need to determine the features that should be added to their system as part of the next release. They will wish to select these features to ensure the demands of their client base are satisfied as much as possible while at the same time ensuring that they themselves have the resources to undertake the necessary development. This situation is modelled in this paper and the problem of selecting an optimal next release is shown to be NP-hard. The use of various modem heuristics to find a high quality but possibly suboptimal solution is described. Comparative studies of these heuristics are given for various test cases. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.