A Product Software Knowledge Infrastructure for Situational Capability Maturation: Vision and Case Studies in Product Management

Product software companies face the challenge of shipping new releases of their software products in time, within budget, with the right quality, and for a good price. As we encountered many performance failures in this respect, we started to build a product software knowledge infrastructure, which, when fully materialized, can help to increase the maturity of a company’s processes. The infrastructure leverages earlier research on situational method engineering and incorporates the maturity concept. Many product software companies have identified product management as a major function to deal with matters of release and requirements management. Therefore the infrastructure focuses particularly on these processes. In building the infrastructure we performed case studies at two companies. We found that product management processes change over time, and have become more mature. As such the study of evolution of product management processes is a promising step in building the full product software knowledge infrastructure.