The Next Release Problem Revisited: A New Avenue for Goal Models

Context. Goal models have long been critiqued for the time it takes to construct them as well as for their limited cognitive and visual scalability. Is such criticism general or does it depend on the supported task? Objectives. We advocate for the latter and the aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the next release problem is a suitable application domain for goal models. This hypothesis stems from the fact that product release management is a long-term investment, and software products are commonly managed in "themes" which are smaller focus areas of the product. Methods. We employ a version of goal models that is tailored for the next release problem by capturing requirements, synergies among them, constraints, and release objectives. Such goal model allows discovering optimal solutions considering multiple criteria for the next release. Results. A retrospective case study confirms that goal models are easier to read and comprehend when organized in themes, and that the reasoning results help product managers decide for the next release. Our scalability experiments show that, through reasoning based on optimization modulo theories, the discovery of the optimal solution is fast and scales sufficiently well with respect to the model size, connectivity, and number of alternative solutions.