  In the last few years it has been seen that many software vendors have
started delivering projects incrementally with very short release cycles. Best
examples of success of this approach has been Ubuntu Operating system that has
a 6 months release cycle and popular web browsers such as Google Chrome, Opera,
Mozilla Firefox. However there is very little knowledge available to the
project managers to validate the chosen release cycle length. We propose a
decision support system that helps to validate and estimate release cycle
length in the early development phase by assuming that release cycle length is
directly affected by three factors, (i) choosing right requirements for current
cycle, (ii) estimating proximal time for each requirement, (iii) requirement
wise feedback from last iteration based on product reception, model accuracy
and failed requirements. We have altered and used the EVOLVE technique proposed
by G. Ruhe to select best requirements for current cycle and map it to time
domain using UCP (Use Case Points) based estimation and feedback factors. The
model has been evaluated on both in-house as well as industry projects.
