A general economics model of software reuse
ICSE '92 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Software engineering
Software reuse: metrics and models
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Software reuse: architecture, process and organization for business success
Software reuse: architecture, process and organization for business success
Evaluating the cost of software quality
Communications of the ACM
OSS essentials: support system solutions for service providers
OSS essentials: support system solutions for service providers
Computational intelligence as an emerging paradigm of software engineering
SEKE '02 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Software engineering and knowledge engineering
Software development cost estimation approaches – A survey
Annals of Software Engineering
The business case for software reuse
IBM Systems Journal
Determining how much software assurance is enough?: a value-based approach
EDSER '05 Proceedings of the seventh international workshop on Economics-driven software engineering research
A Guide for Management and Financial Controls of Product Lines
SPLC '07 Proceedings of the 11th International Software Product Line Conference
Information and Software Technology
Calculating ROI for Software Product Lines
IEEE Software
An Integrative Economic Optimization Approach to Systems Development Risk Management
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Monetary pricing of software development risks: A method and empirical illustration
Journal of Systems and Software
Modeling dynamics in agile software development
ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS)
State of the practice in software effort estimation: a survey and literature review
CEE-SET'08 Proceedings of the Third IFIP TC 2 Central and East European conference on Software engineering techniques
Software Engineering Economics
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Software quality assurance economics
Information and Software Technology
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Context: Software systems are commonly used in a variety of industries as a means of automating organizational business processes. Initially, such software is often developed in-house by the vertical organizations possibly with the support of professional IT service providers; however, in many cases, internally developed software is eventually replaced with the software products provided by independent software vendors. These vendors often use license fees to recover their software development investments, as well as to gain some margin. However, if the vendor's customer base for a specific type of software is limited, then either the license fees are too high and hence the customers may prefer to develop the software internally, or the margin has to be decreased. As a result, the market for software products of that type may not materialize. Objective: The paper introduces an analytical model that defines the minimum number of customers that the software vendor should have for its software to be less expensive as compared to the in-house software. Method: Following a conceptual-analytical approach, a model is constructed wherein the minimum number of a vendor's customers is represented as a function of other factors affecting software development costs. This model is verified by applying it to estimate the minimum customer base in the segment of telecommunications billing mediation software. Results: Using the proposed analytical model, the minimum number of customers and the maximum number of software vendors in this segment are evaluated. The obtained results are found to be in line with the information available from a telecommunications software market database. Conclusions: Based on the model, a preliminary conclusion is made that in industries with high software development costs, heterogeneous legacy systems to integrate with, and a limited pool of potential customers, the number of software vendors is unlikely to be significant, and hence the in-house or custom-made software is unlikely to be superseded by the software products.