Centre for Technology Management

Software Management

Integrating business considerations into software development strategies

Software is increasingly becoming a significant component of manufactured products. Software may be used to control or qualify manufacturing process or may itself be contained in products such as embedded systems.  Companies are therefore building or acquiring a growing bank of software assets, which differ from other assets as they are 'intangible' The development of these assets and their subsequent management can have a significant impact on business performance.

Considerable Investment in software may be required by companies to achieve their aims and any one of  a number of  strategies may be adopted, including the use of open source, construction of libraries of re-usable code, the use of proprietary solutions, outsourcing or internal knowledge building. Integrating the strategies adopted by companies in the software development with the business aims is the main theme of this research work.

The work in this area cuts across a number of specific research themes, such as the management of intangible and knowledge based assets, technology appraisal and make-or buy decision making.

Software make or buy

An increasing source of cost and risk for manufacturers now emanates from the software contained in products such as embedded systems. Examples of these include: engine controllers, magnetic swipe card systems, frost-free fridge controllers, bar code readers, etc. Manufacturers must make choices to either invest in the skills and resources to both design these software-dependent systems and also support them over a potentially long lifecycle or to buy these from outside. The factors influencing these choices are complex and require the balancing of heterogeneous factors including: availability of skilled labour, potential for obsolescence in components, uncertainties in relationships with suppliers,  etc. Also, it may be most cost-effective to buy in at one stage of the system's lifecycle (e.g. design) yet invest in an internal infrastructure for other stages (e.g. operational support and version changes).

 A  toolset to help managers navigate the big three sourcing decisions

• Is it sensible to do this outside our organisation?
• Who is the best partner?
• How should we implement and manage the partnership?

The toolset includes a hypertext check list, a set of guidelines and a set of case examples

Open source software development

Open source software development is undertaken by loosely linked communities of developers and engineers, often with no direct commercial backing. Software system developed through open source communities have been adopted by many organisations, large and small and the movement is growing, driven by the increasing complexity and cost of developments. Open Source projects are typically distributed all around the world and performed by volunteers. Due to these two characteristics, Open Source projects face several challenges related to quality assurance.  Work within CTM has been undertaken to identify some causes of the problems through research into methods and practice.  Current research activity is centred around release managements.

Inadequate release management can lead to a number of problems, such as software which is out of date, breaks compatibility, does not meet the quality standards or the requirements of users. This research aims to identify such problems, to identify good practices in free software and develop further processes and techniques to improve release management in free software projects. In order to make sure that the outcomes of this research will be used by projects to improve release management, there  is a close interaction with the free software community.