Veikko Seppänen

Toward a practical solution for capturing knowledge for software projects

Rarely has a professional field evolved as quickly as software development. Software organizations are continuously struggling to keep abreast of new technologies frequently changing customer requirements; and increasingly complex software architectures, methods, and tools. Recently, many organizations have come to understand that to succeed in the future, they must manage and use knowledge more effectively at individual, team, and organizational levels. Efficient creation, distribution, and reuse of up-to-date knowledge are critical success factors that unfortunately remain difficult to achieve in practice. Knowledge-sharing events between group members have proven to be a better way of sharing knowledge than the database, but the results of these events could never be packaged and reused for future projects. One companys solution was to develop a needs-based approach that would deliver knowledge just in time.

Practical Process Improvement for Embedded Real-Time Software

This article presents a practical total quality management (TQM) based approach to software process improvement known as PR2IMER (Practical Process Improvement for Embedded Real-time Software) which VTT Electronics has used successfully in more than 10 ..

COTS component acquisition in an emerging market

Component-based software engineering has generated much interest among researchers and in industry. Purported CBSE benefits include lower development costs, higher productivity, and more manageable quality of the developed software. But todays software component market is far from mature - it is, at best, in the early emerging phase and hence lacks industry standards and management guidelines. Understanding the COTS component markets evolution and dynamics can help buyers make more effective component choices and ultimately influence market development.

Evolution of Secondary Software Businesses: Understanding Industry Dynamics

Primary software industry originates from IBM’s decision to unbundle software-related computer system development activities to external partners. This kind of outsourcing from an enterprise internal software development activity is a common means to start a new software business serving a vertical software market. It combines knowledge of the vertical market process with competence in software development. In this research, we present and analyze the key figures of the Finnish secondary software industry, in order to quantify its interaction with the primary software industry during the period of 2000–2003. On the basis of the empirical data, we present a model for evolution of a secondary software business, which makes explicit the industry dynamics. It represents the shift from internal software developed for competitive advantage to development of products supporting standard business processes on top of standardized technologies. We also discuss the implications for software business strategies in each phase.

Evolution of competence in software subcontracting projects

Abstract This paper addresses the evolution of competence in contractual software development projects based on the findings of two case studies, where the skills of a software subcontractor were made explicit and their change during the past 14 years was analysed. Competence evolution is crucial for software subcontractors, not only to stay in the market as professional service firms, but to build the assets needed for being able to offer service products. This requires a relationship-based view to competence creation and management, which has not been emphasised in the literature.

Original software component manufacturing: survey of the State-of-the-Practice

This paper analyses the state-of-the-practice of software components produced in strategic partnerships. We call this kind of business original software component manufacturing (OCM), referring to the concept of original equipment manufacturing (OEM) that is well known in other industries. The analysis is mostly based on information acquired from Internet in Fall 2000, dealing with OCM supplier; brokering and buyer companies. Based on the analysis, the context of OCM is outlined and a suggestion made for further R&D activities.

The Formation and Management of a Software Outsourcing Partnership Process

The focus of this research is on outsourcing partnerships - what is the process involved in the formation and management of a software research and development (R & D) outsourcing partnership. A complete picture of a software outsourcing partnership life cycle cannot be found in the literature. Because of that a synthesis outsourcing partnership life cycle model has been created based on the models found in other studies. Empirical data from a software R & D outsourcing partnership case is analysed based on the synthesis model, and a new, improved model is created. The new model gives a more in-depth insight into the formation and management process of an outsourcing partnership. Even though the model is created and presented mainly from the customer company viewpoint, it has been affected by the partner company viewpoint as well, as the case data was collected from both companies

Market‐oriented resource management in customer relationships

Purpose – To model how resources and capabilities co‐evolved in a contract research providers customer relationships and how this affected market orientation, and to develop hypotheses for further testing.Design/methodology/approach – Single qualitative and abductive longitudinal case study.Findings – The provider focused on generating knowledge of current and near future customer needs through interactions with customers and other key actors. The provider also pursued the building of capabilities which would enable it to broaden the application areas to the needs of a larger group of potential customers. Exchanges with specific customers were used by the provider for the acquisition of resources and capabilities concerning details related to functions and, especially, applications, yet these resources and capabilities were subsequently broadened to all‐around solutions. In contrast, customer interactions were less important in acquiring resources and capabilities. Eight hypotheses were also formulated.R...

From software configuration to application management—improving the maturity of the maintenance of embedded software

The electronic and automation industries develop and maintain software embedded in computer-controlled products. Configuration management is one of the basic activities that must be performed in order to control product level changes for maintaining product integrity. Practitioners have traditionally seen version control as a sufficient solution to the configuration management problem. However, increasingly complex products have forced them to consider the problem more comprehensively. Flexible delivery of products based on automated change control is a key activity in application management which is a new challenge for traditional configuration management practices. Companies developing embedded software may operate with a rather low level of maintenance process maturity. The assessment of software process maturity is based on various factors. Configuration Management (CM) is one of the basic goals at the ‘repeatable’ level of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). The higher the maturity levels that are sought, the more integrated the CM environment used has to be. The definition and implementation of change control is one of the basic problems to be solved when seeking advanced CM practices. Change control can be regarded as a bridge from software maintenance to configuration management. Although CM is regarded as a known technology, the maintenance of embedded computer systems sets new types of requirements. One of the major differences between embedded and legacy systems has been the secondary role of software in several embedded computer systems. In this paper, we describe an incremental approach advancing from CM to application management which was developed in co-operation with industry. The approach is strongly biased towards re-engineering driven software maintenance. Two cases are described, one of which indicates maintenance requirements for CM. In this case the starting level of CM is low and the secondary role of software sets specific requirements for the CM development. The other case describes an environment where advanced techniques supporting maintenance are linked to CM features. The procedure for dealing with these cases is based on predefined requirements, scenarios to implement these requirements, and technical solutions.

Object-oriented re-engineering of embedded software

Abstract Embedded computer systems, incorporated in various types of products, are common in many everyday goods, industrial equipment and machine automation systems. Because embedded systems have been developed for several years in the context of certain product domains, but for different customers and based on different technologies, families of embedded systems have emerged in those product domains. Such families need to be constantly re-engineered for developing new systems. Yet, organised reuse of the experiences gained from the development of certain system families is not widespread. In connection with the increased use of object-oriented methodologies in the development of real-time computer systems, better means will be provided for reusable embedded software architectures and components. As a result of the developments in the 1980s, re-engineering for reusability requires in practice the redesign and generalisation of individual structured embedded system models and software implementations as object-oriented models and implementations. However, there is a gap between the results of research on pure object-oriented approaches and their implementation for production use in a re-engineering process of embedded software. A pure object-oriented approach would result in the losing of the straightforward traceability between the re-engineered analysis and design models and the original structured models. Combinative and adaptive object-oriented approaches seem to be reasonable for the re-engineering process, because they incorporate and modify traditional static, dynamic and functional modelling techniques into object-oriented modelling. The reasons for this opinion are justified in this paper using the remodelling of control software of machine automation systems as an example.