2009 Third International Workshop on Software Product Management

Although agile software development methods such as SCRUM and DSDM are gaining popularity, the consequences of applying agile principles to software product management have received little attention until now. In this paper, this gap is filled by the introduction of a method for the application of SCRUM principles to software product management. For this purpose, the 'agile requirements refinery' ... View full abstract»

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 decisi... View full abstract»

The traditional literature of software product management focuses on sales, marketing and executive management as key internal stakeholders for the product manager. However in public companies and private companies positioning for a public offering, the importance of reported accounting revenue can cause the finance office to become a significant additional stakeholder. The concerns of finance can... View full abstract»

Decision outcomes and their lead times are critical in product management, as the market success of a product may strongly depend on the both the decisions themselves and their timing in relation to the market and competitors. This paper presents an investigation of one particular industrial case study data set by comparing upstream scoping decisions with downstream change decision. The results in... View full abstract»

In this paper, a user-centered and mass-customized design process is proposed that unifies Personas and Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE). The key to this proposal is the relationship between persona-weighted feature matrices and product-feature matrices. We propose a development method that (1) creates personas before the product portfolio scoping stage, and (2) adds extra personas during ... View full abstract»

Context is a significant factor in deciding the set of requirements relevant to a system (i.e., software product construction), the alternatives the system can adopt to satisfy these requirements, and the quality assessment of each alternative. By context we mean the conditions in the operating environment of an system that influences how the system should behave in different situations. However, ... View full abstract»

A key principle when performing research studies is that of randomisation, in order to counter any effects that the ordering of tasks, elements, subjects, etc. may have on the dependent variables. When performing requirements prioritisation, it is not always possible (e.g., because of how prioritisation methods are constructed) or even desirable to randomise all requirements before prioritising th... View full abstract»

We developed and used a method that gathers relevant stakeholders to elicit, prioritize, and elaborate the quality goals of a software product. It is designed to be lightweight and easy to learn compared to methods for a more comprehensive analysis of non-functional requirements. The method and the resulting quality goals are meant especially for improving the software product management process. ... View full abstract»