Fritz Stallinger

Linking Software Life Cycle Activities with Product Strategy and Economics: Extending ISO/IEC 12207 with Product Management Best Practices

Traditional software engineering reaches its limits when facing increased complexity and variability of software products. Approaches like software product line engineering are considered promising to successfully tackle such challenges. However, to fully exploit its potential, any product- and reuse-focused development approach poses the need to closely link core software engineering activities with strategic and economic product aspects. Product management is generally expected to bridge this gap from business and product related goals to software life cycle activities, but often fails to deliver the promised outcomes. Moreover, software process improvement approaches generally lack the provision of explicit or detailed product management activities. – This paper presents the results of extracting key product management practices from selected software product line and product management frameworks. The obtained results are compared against ISO/IEC 12207 in order to identify directions for defining a standard conformant reference model for process improvement in product-oriented software development contexts.

Extending ISO/IEC 12207 with Software Product Management: A Process Reference Model Proposal

Software product management is generally expected to link and integrate business and product related goals with core software engineering and software life cycle activities. Empirical research demonstrates the positive effect of mature software product management practices on key software development performance indicators. Nevertheless, the various frameworks available for software product management have distinct and diverse focus points, are often linked or incorporated with specific development paradigms, or lack integration with or addressing of core software engineering activities. On the other hand, traditional software process improvement approaches generally lack the provision of explicit or detailed software product management activities. – In this paper we build on the results of preceding research on identifying a lack of software product management practices within ISO/IEC 12207 and on deriving key outcomes of software product management activities from selected software product management frameworks. Based on these results we propose a process reference model for software product management that can be integrated with the process reference model as defined in ISO/IEC 12207 for software life cycle processes.

Migrating towards evolving software product lines: challenges of an SME in a core customer-driven industrial systems engineering context

In this paper we identify key challenges a medium-sized software organization is facing in migrating towards Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE). The software engineering context of the company is characterized by a two-fold access to the market - core customer driven product enhancement and product development for a broader, anonymous market - and the embedding of software engineering in multi-disciplinary systems and solutions engineering. Based on a characterization of the business, the software product subject to migration towards SPLE, and the goals and background of the SPLE initiative, seven key challenges with respect to the migration are identified. These challenges relate to process diversity in the face of multiple reuse approaches; the management of requirements and variability; the integration of requirements traceability and variability management; legacy software and discipline vs. software-specific modularization; integration with systems engineering; costing and pricing models; and project vs. product documentation.

Software Engineering Strategies: Aligning Software Process Improvement with Strategic Goals

Aligning software process improvement with the business and strategic goals of an enterprise is a key success factor for process improvement. Software process improvement methods typically only provide little or generic guidance for goal centered process improvements. We provide a framework for developing software engineering strategies that are aligned with corporate strategies and goals. Strategic objects as an important part of our framework can be directly aligned with SPICE or CMMI processes. This allows that any process improvement action can be systematically aligned with strategic goals.

From Software to Software System Products: An Add-on Process Reference Model for Enhancing ISO/IEC 12207 with Product Management and System-Level Reuse

As software is increasingly developed as part of an overall, often multidisciplinary system, traditional engineering approaches often reach their limits when faced with increasing complexity, variability, requirements, or cost and productivity pressure. Generally, reuse and product-orientation are considered promising approaches to tackle such challenges, but to fully exploit their potential require an effective product management function. Although established software process life cycle models acknowledge the importance of reuse, they do not consider appropriate product management practices, while established systems engineering life cycle models lack reuse as well as product management. - We therefore propose the integration of a process model proposal for software product management with one for enhancing system life cycle processes with reuse and product-orientation. The resulting model can be used as add-on to ISO/IEC 12207 and serve as a framework for process assessment and improvement in contexts where software is developed and evolved as a product and at the same time is part of an overall software-intensive system product.

Software Engineering – Processes and Tools

Software engineering traditionally plays an important role among the different research directions located in the Software Park Hagenberg, as it provides the fundamental concepts, methods and tools for producing reliable and high quality software. Software engineering as a quite young profession and engineering discipline is not limited to focus on how to create simple software programs, but in fact introduces a complex and most of the time quite costly lifecycle of software and derived products. Some efforts have been made to define software engineering as a profession and to outline the boundaries of this emerging field of research [PP04, Som04]. Several different definitions of the term software engineering appeared since its first mentioning on a NATO Software Engineering Conference in 1968.

Towards Methodological Support for the Engineering of Process Reference Models for Product Software

Reference models available for software process improvement are often not satisfactorily suitable for application in the improvement of product-oriented software engineering. The resulting need to develop more suitable models for the engineering of software products by integrating, customizing, specializing or enhancing existing models is additionally enforced by the wide spectrum of models available, but focused on specific improvement areas or engineering paradigms, and the need of companies and industry sectors for compliance with more than one model. The goal of the research underlying this paper is thus to support the development of process reference models for the context of product-oriented software engineering by distilling methodological support for the derivation of respective model development methods. The aim of the present paper is to present the goals, identified related work and state-of-the-art, and the envisioned approach of this ongoing research to the software process improvement community.

Improving mechatronical engineering: An artifact-assessment-based approach

Industrial engineering as a specialization of systems engineering inherently has mechatronic character. The seamless integration of engineering activities across engineering disciplines and throughout the overall engineering life cycle is a key element for achieving optimal technical as well as economic results and has to be supported by adequate engineering concepts and models. In this paper we present a criteria catalog for the qualitative evaluation of engineering artifacts created in or for engineering projects or contained in mechatronic product catalogs. The criteria catalog forms the basis for an assessment-based approach for evaluating mechatronic objects with the main purposes of providing the basis for characterizing, comparing, and improving them and furthermore for identifying directions for engineering improvements.

A Framework for Innovation System Customization for Product Line-Based Software Businesses

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) allows delivering customized software products at reduced costs and time while simultaneously enhancing quality. To realize these benefits, it employs systematic variability management and proactive planning and engineering for reuse which to a significant extent require prescribing features, variants, etc. In an environment of increasingly demanding customers and ongoing pressure on costs, time, and quality, the risk increases that the necessary changes compromise the product lines envisioned structure and benefits. Innovating and flexibly adapting a product line to changing needs is thus highly challenging. Organizations are faced with a bulk of innovation approaches, models, success factors, etc. while the key challenge remains to establish an innovation management system tailored to an organizations specific needs. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework designed to supports SPLE organizations in developing a customized innovation system comprised of the elements innovation strategy, structure, process, culture, measurement, incentives, and learning by providing the requirements for these elements derived from the organizations business characteristics.

Assessing Software Product Management Capability: An Industry Validation Case Study

Software product management is expected to link and integrate business and product related goals with core software engineering and software life cycle activities. Nevertheless, traditional software process improvement approaches like ISO/IEC 12207 lack the provision of explicit and detailed software product management activities. – In this paper we share the results of a real-world industrial pilot validation of an emerging process reference model for software product management capable for integration with ISO/IEC 12207. The results are discussed with respect to a qualitative evaluation of the reference model and analyzed with respect to enhancements of the model.