Quality - based software release management

An obstacle to resolving software engineering challenges is the support of the management. The issues of interest to management mostly relate to the encompassing business organization. There is not enough empirical evidence to establish a strong link between the technical and non-technical issues surrounding software product development. This dissertation provides such a link: a framework for supporting the decision making process and improving the software product management. The main pillars of this framework are: locality of focus, multiplicity of concerns, data centricity, and continuous improvement. In line with the ISO 9000-2000 standard fundamentals, the framework aims to formalize what the organization does, provide a means of monitoring its progress, and identifying problems based on factual data. A key ingredient of this framework is its infrastructure. The business intelligence technologies, in particular data warehousing, provide flexibility, scalability, and repeatability for the proposed framework. The dissertation concludes with an application of the presented ideas to an industrial case study.