Customer Reviews

Product Release Planning: Methods, Tools and Applications

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Ruhe's book is truly excellent and comprehensive. He address the breadth of the decisions required for product releases from prioritizing features to staffing and practically everything in between. He also brings very sophisticated methods into the process.

For example, the collection of desired features in planning for a release is particularly difficult. There are usually many different voices competing for the development resources and there are limitations on both budget and schedule. The investor's voice (usually a sponsor) addresses time-value of money. The developer's voice who is concerned that product architecture addresses concerns for product support and maintainability. The customer's voice may be several different value systems. Marketing is interesting in features that yield high product margins. End users are interested in transaction volume and learning requirements. Their bosses are interested in the performance of their respective businesses. Ruhe describes a decision process that identifies different collections of features rather than strictly feature by feature. Each collection meets budget and / or schedule constraints but each collection is as different as possible by the collection of the stakeholder values. This allows stakeholders to better understand the necessary compromises to improve the value of their selection.

I would declare this book a "must read" for leaders of product development organizations.

Guenther Rule provides an excellent and comprehensive overview of how product releases can be planned and how schedules and staff can be optimized accordingly. His book helped me get up-to-speed on the topic quickly so that I could make important decisions about the software development lifecycle at my company. I am a CIO of a small Internet media firm. Thank you.