Chartwell Diagnostic and Imaging Centre

Operational release planning (ORP) is concerned with assigning humanresources to development tasks in software projects such that a defined setof product features can be completed under given constraints. In this paper, wepresent a simulation-based approach to study the impact of uncertainty. Uncertaintyparameters considered in this paper are related to the features themselves(functionality, effort) and to developers (availability and productivity). The effectof variation of these four parameters (two static and two dynamic) onmake-span is studied in isolation and in combination. This is done for three levelsof (stochastic) pessimism ("bad", "worse", and "worst"). In addition to that,a comparison is done with a deterministic worst case scenario. To illustrate theapplicability of the method and usefulness of results, we have conducted anexplorative case study at Chartwell Technology Inc.