Software release management: a business perspective

  • Authors:

  • Mayuram S. Krishnan

  • Affiliations:

  • GSIA, Schenley Park, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

  • Venue:
  • CASCON '94 Proceedings of the 1994 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
  • Year:
  • 1994

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Abstract

Increasing competition in the software industry, constantly changing customer needs, along with the usual problems associated with software maintenance, have made timing of a new software release extremely important for the success of a software vendor in the market place. Once the base release of a software is introduced in the market, based on the customers experience, a number of new features and enhancements are identified. Moreover, the complexity of maintaining the software increases over time because of the increase in the installed customer base and change in the entropy of the system. This paper proposes an economic model to capture the various tradeoffs involved in software release decisions and further discusses methods to obtain optimal software release time. Also investigated are the potential effects of factors related to the software development process, product characteristics such as size and the changing market needs on the optimal time of software product introduction.