Concepts of product software

Abstract

Both the impact of software on life and our dependence on software is rapidly increasing. Using product software is an everyday phenomenon and product software is a major worldwide industry. Yet, there are very few scientific studies reported on the engineering of product software specifically. In this paper, we discuss specifics of the software business, the various terms used for product software and provide our definition of product software. Moreover, we explain difference between product software and tailor-made software from a software development perspective and provide a new framework for the categorization of product software. This paper points out the urgent need for more research on product software and the directions.

Keywords:

• product software
• tailor-made software
• commercial software
• open-source software

Acknowledgements

We thank Slinger Jansen, Gillian van Hees, the anonymous reviewers, and the editors of the special issue for their valuable remarks that led to considerable improvement of the paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lai Xu

About the authors

Lai Xu is a Senior Research Scientist at CSIRO ICT Centre, Australia. Previously, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Organization and Information Group of the Institute of Information and Computing Sciences of the Utrecht University, The Netherlands and at the Artificial Intelligence group of the Department of Computer Science of the Free University Amsterdam. She received her Ph.D. in Computerized Information Systems from Tilburg University, the Netherlands in 2004. Her main research areas are in process integration, multi-party process monitoring, web services and service-oriented applications, development methods for product software.

Sjaak Brinkkemper

Sjaak Brinkkemper is full professor of organization and information at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences of the Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He leads a group of about 20 researchers specialized in product software development and entrepreneurship. The main research themes of the group are methodology of product software development, implementation and adoption, and business-economic aspects of the product software industry.

Before, he was a consultant at the Vanenburg Group and a Chief Architect at Baan. Before Baan, he held academic positions at the University of Twente and the University of Nijmegen, both in the Netherlands, and visiting positions at the University of Texas at Austin (U.S.A.) and Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan). He holds an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Nijmegen. He has published six books and about 120 papers on his research interests: software product development, information systems methodology, meta-modelling and method engineering.