Software Product Lifecycle Research Articles

Optimal Timing of Upgrades over a Software Product's Life Cycle

As software ages, it is increasingly unable to leverage new technologies and fulfill evolving user requirements. Firms producing software products therefore get an opportunity to introduce and sell upgrades. Our research looks at the optimal intervals between upgrades, and whether these intervals should increase or decrease over the product's life cycle. Although the accelerating pace of hardware and software developments (e.g. Moore's law) suggests decreasing intervals between upgrades, real business data for several commonly used commercial software products shows the opposite. To investigate this discrepancy, we set up model incorporating the costs and revenues from upgrades for a monopoly software producer. Our analysis confirms that the optimal upgrade intervals are monotonically increasing along the product's life cycle. Understanding of the optimal upgrade intervals allows managers to infer the upgrade costs involved and thus helps them to allocate budgets for managing these upgrades.

How to manage your software product life cycle with MAUI

MAUI monitors multiple software engineering metrics and milestones to analyze a software product's development life cycle in real time.

Creating Effective Multimedia Instruction

s English: This paper presents information on several critical themes related to multimedia instruction. An understanding of these issues will be helpful to anyone involved in the design, development or use of computer delivered instruction. Topics addressed in this paper focus on: software product life cycle; systematic approach to design; multimedia design and development teams; production values; critical components of effective multimedia; learner motivation and continuous evaluation

Software reliability measurement

The measurement and analysis aspects of software reliability are described with the aim of providing software engineers and managers a sense of where and how software reliability measurements can be applied to their projects. Some background for understanding software reliability measurement is provided, and activities associated with measuring and analyzing software reliability are discussed in the context of the software product life cycle. The focus is on failures and the rate at which they occur. The thrust of reliability measurement and analysis is to specify what the customer needs in terms of reliability before a software product is built, to validate that these needs are met before delivery of the product to the customer, and to make sure that the customer's needs continue to be met after delivery. >

Marketing methods for software

This article discusses several marketing considerations that are especially appropriate for software products. These include: the importance of focusing on customer needs, market segmentation, developing a marketing strategy, the software product life cycle, strategies for positioning a software product, selecting an effective brand name, new product development, pricing strategies, channels of distribution, promotion, and the use of direct marketing. Examples from the software industry are used as illustrations.