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In software intensive products such as cars or telecom systems, software has traditionally been associated with cost, and there has been no real perception of its value in relation to the entire product offering. However, because software is becoming a larger part of the main competitive advantage, driving innovation and product differentiation, hardware is becoming more standardized, thus the valuation of software is becoming critical. In existing literature, several value constructs and corresponding valuation/measurement solutions needed for making decisions about software product development are presented. However, the contributions are often isolated with respect to a certain perspective such as focusing on product's internal or external quality aspects only. Consequently, a complete view of value constructs relevant from different perspectives required for making decisions about software product development is missing. This paper presents a consolidated view of the software value concept utilizing the major perspectives and introduces a software value map. The created value map was evaluated through an industry case study through the development of impact evaluation patterns, which were subsequently used by professionals in industry, and experiences gathered. During industry evaluation, practitioners found substantial benefits of having a consolidated, vastly improved, and extended value aspect's view of software. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Sustaining innovation in a fast growing software development company is difficult. As organisations grow, peoples' focus often changes from the big picture of the product being developed to the specific role they fill. This paper presents two complementary approaches that were successfully used to support continued developer-driven innovation in a rapidly growing Australian agile software development company. The method "FedEx TM Day" gives developers one day to showcase a proof of concept they believe should be part of the product, while the method "20% Time" allows more ambitious projects to be undertaken. Given the right setting and management support, the two approaches can support and improve bottom-up innovation in organizations.

Rubrics and oral feedback are approaches to help students improve performance and meet learning outcomes. However, their effect on the actual improvement achieved is inconclusive. This paper evaluates the effect of rubrics and oral feedback on student learning outcomes. An experiment was conducted in a software engineering course on requirements engineering, using the two approaches in course assignments. Both approaches led to statistically significant improvements, though no material improvement (i.e., a change by more than one grade) was achieved. The rubrics led to a significant decrease in the number of complaints and questions regarding grades.

Software requirement triage and selection in market- driven requirements engineering is a crucial activity for the success of a project, product and company. This paper presents state-of-the- art and state-of-practice in requirements triage and selection through systematic literature review and an industrial survey. Industry practitioner can read solutions that have been proposed in literature and most applicable challenges and factors considered today and factors to be considered ideally to address the challenges, which have been collected through the survey. For researchers, the results show which challenges still needs to be addressed.

Current practices in the industry are moving towards the market-driven development of software intensive products compared to customer-specific system development. Consequently, product management is faced with several challenges that have to be addressed as a part of the market-driven requirements engineering process. One of the important challenges is how to select the right mix of requirements, balancing short-term and long-term gains. One way to address this challenge is to utilize product strategies for selecting requirements. However, in order to do this the internal success-critical stakeholders (SCS) involved in strategies creation and requirements selection need to be aligned with respect to a product's strategic goals and objectives. This paper presents a method to enable the evaluation of degree of alignment between SCS with respect to the understanding and interpretation of a product's strategy. Further, the method not only enables the evaluation of alignment, but also specifically shows misalignment, and enables the identification of leading causes. The method has been developed in collaboration with the industry and its application is shown through a case study at Ericsson AB

Requirements bundling is known to help coping with the complexity of large scale requirements engineering. The multiplicity of the dimensions of this bundling is not often emphasized, yet causes issues which remain unsolved.

Background: Continuous software product development is increasingly becoming the norm. New requirements come in a constant stream and need to be assigned to projects to make it into a release. However, in the literature requirements management practices are project based and no longer naturally fit to this new setting. Aim: Thus, it is of interest to understand the industrial practices for the identification of requirements and associated artifacts put under configuration control. Method: An industrial survey with five companies was conducted to find out these industrial practices. Results: The results of this survey show that with the need to manage more requirements also comes the need for greater control. Large companies, however, often place similar control on products of all size. Moreover, regardless of size and requirements management practices, companies face the same problems. Conclusions: All companies should keep requirements associated material under some form of control and updates to them should be communicated to the involved stakeholders and should be easy to access. The type of associated artifacts kept under control can be decided by the criteria given., http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=conWebDoc.34779

Innovation enables product differentiation and supports market growth. However, determining the value of an innovative feature is a difficult task due to the number of risks and uncertainties involved. This paper proposes the use of real options theory to support software product managers to decide whether to make an investment in an innovative feature or not. This approach creates a richer decision space, allowing for more informed decision-making, leading to greater return on potential.

This paper presents a systematic review of all the solutions addressing different economic aspect of software product lines (SPL), e.g. SPL adoption cost-benefits, PL architecture decisions, SPL test strategies project cost overrun and so on, presented for the years 2000 to 2007. The goal of the review is to analyze the level of empirical application and/or validation of the proposed solutions with the purpose of mapping maturity as well as to what extent proposed solutions might be proven in terms of usability and usefulness. The important finding of this review is that although many economic solutions for SPL have been proposed over the years, the absence of qualitative and quantitative results from empirical application and/or validation makes it difficult to evaluate the potential of proposed solutions with respect to their usability and/or usefulness in relation to industry adoption. Suggestions have been presented to improve the existing situation.

In market-driven product development large numbers of requirements threaten to overload the development organization. It is critical for product management to select the requirements aligned with the overall business goals and discard others as early as possible. This paper presents a method that utilizes strategies for early requirements triage. The method presented is based on good practices from management literature customized for technical product strategy formulation. The creation of the method was also inspired by industry needs through exploratory interviews covering requirements triage and selection processes as well as strategy formulation. After creation, the method was subsequently validated in industry where the aspects of usability and usefulness were investigated, yielding promising initial results.