HONG KONG BAPTIST UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF SCIENCE

Department of Computer Science Seminar
2009 Series

Planning for Optimized Product Releases

Dr. Guenther Ruhe
University of Calgary

Date: April 20, 2009 (Monday)
Time: 11:30 am - 12:30 pm
Venue: RRS905, Sir Run Run Shaw Building, Ho Sin Hang Campus

Abstract
The challenge of the product managers is to make release decisions in consideration of time-to-market, customer satisfaction, customer dissatisfaction, competitiveness and risk. Under the pressure of time, size and complexity, the decision is often done ad hoc, mainly relying on intuition and experience. Release planning is the critical decision process of deciding which features are implemented in which releases. From a set of features, a selection and sequencing task needs to be performed. In reality, the set of features is dynamically updated because new features continually arrive and other (existing) features need to be updated. In this talk, we outline a hybrid planning approach integrating the strength of computational intelligence with the knowledge and experience of human experts. Besides planning on a strategic level, we look into the follow-up problems of re-planning as well as the operational staffing of human resources for the next release. For the latter, a focused search approach and its application in t real-world case study are reported.

Biography
Dr. Ruhe (http://sern.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~ruhe/) received a doctorate rer. nat degree in Mathematics with emphasis on Operations Research from Freiberg University, Germany and a doctorate habil. nat. degree from both the Technical University of Leipzig and University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. He got an Alexander von Humboldt research fellowship at University of Kaiserslautern in 1992. Ruhe was visiting scientist at the IBM Research Centre in Heidelberg in 1993. From 1996 until 2001 he was deputy director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering in Germany. Günther Ruhe holds an Industrial Research Chair in Software Engineering at the University of Calgary. His main results and publications are in software engineering decision support, software release planning, software project management. His interdisciplinary research includes mathematical optimization, software measurement, simulation and empirical methods. Dr. Ruhe has organized different international conferences and workshops, has given keynotes at various conferences and is a reviewer for a variety of journals in software engineering, computer science and operations research. He has published more than 160 reviewed research papers at journals, workshops and conferences. He is the Associate Editor of the IST journal, a member of the Editorial Board of a number of journals. He holds the position of a TRLabs Scientist and is a member of the ACM, the IEEE Computer Society, and the Informatics Society German GI.

********* ALL INTERESTED ARE WELCOME ***********
(For enquiry, please contact Computer Science Department at 3411 2385)

http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/v1/?page=seminars&id=13&lang=sc
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