software product development process model: case studies of mobile software companies
TRANSCRIPT
Software Product Development Process Model:
Case Studies of Mobile Software Companies
Tuure Tuunanen∗, Marianne Vainio†
Helsinki School of Economics, P.O. 1210, FIN-00101 Helsinki, Finland
Abstract: We present a preliminary model for Customer-Oriented Software Product
Development. We claim that there is a gap in the literature to integrate R&D and
marketing in developing new software products. We reviewed the literature in new
product development and information systems and find that a rich process discourse
exists but lacks the answer to our problem. Hence, we conducted case studies of Finnish
software companies to understand the development process. We found that by integrating
the established StageGate model to a component based software development model the
case companies were able to manage business and technology related risks associated
with product development.
Keywords: Software, New Product Development, Software Product Development, Case
Study
∗ Corresponding author. Tel +358 40 544 5591, Fax +358 9 431 38700. Email addresses: [email protected] (T. Tuunanen), [email protected] (M.Vainio) † Tel +358 50 5294723, Fax +358 9 431 38700.
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1. Introduction The development of software to customers and or end-users outside of the organization
has been found to be a difficult task. Technological solutions do not usually limit the
R&D process, but usually it has been a case of market failure, when new software
products or services have been launched to the market place, like with the mobile Internet
in Europe in late 1990s (Peffers and Tuunanen, 2002) and later again with the Japanese
3rd generation mobile service FOMA (Sigvartsen, 2001).
Within marketing science, the dilemma has created a thriving discipline, new product
development (NPD), to focus on the problems related to the area. Researchers have
argued that integration of R&D and marketing functions is one of the key issues to
consider for having a successful product or service (Barczak, 1995; Gupta, 1985; Souder,
1988). However, the integration of functions has not been seen as the only required
solution, only a part of the whole. Other researchers have emphasized the relevance of
well-structured process (Cooper, 1990). Cooper (1990) has argued that by producing a
tightening pipeline of NPD with well-defined milestones, a firm is able to minimize the
market risk involved. In addition to ideas of having well-defined process, researchers
have argued for the importance of listening to the voice of the customer (Cooper, 2000;
Hauser, 1988).
In information systems (IS), researchers have struggled to solve the problems of
developing software to serve members of the organization. Lately, the attention has
turned to end users and other external end-users of information systems products or
services (Tuunanen, 2003). The research has focused on the areas of process
improvement, selection of right techniques, and during the last decade involving better
information management in the network that brings the voice of customers to the process.
Especially, an incremental approach of developing software and continuously involving
the market and customer information to the process has been argued to be the most
effective (Boehm, 1988).
We present a gap in the literature in integrating the R&D and marketing in software
development (SD). The gap is described in figure 1. We argue that even though the both
of the disciplines have emphasized the importance of well-structured process, we still
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lack an integrated approach for software product development. Hence, we follow
Nambisan’s (2003) argumentation on using IS as a reference discipline for New Product
Development, and agree with Nambisan and Wilemon (2000) that a combination of
knowledge from the NPD and SD disciplines could provide a solution for the presented
gap.
”The GAP” Information New Software Systems Product Product
Development Development Development
Figure 1. Positioning the research.
Hence, we argue that by integrating the process thinking of new product development and
information systems development (ISD) we can fill the gap of the integration without
losing the voice of the customer (Griffin and Hauser, 1993). We base our argument on
two case studies of Finnish small and medium sized software companies. We present that
the marketing and R&D activities already exist in software organizations and our purpose
is to study how these activities are integrated from the process perspective. Based on
these results, we present a preliminary framework for customer-oriented software product
development.
The structure of the paper is following. We first go through a review of NPD literature
from the perspective of the development process. After this, we review how software
development literature has faced the process management challenges. Thirdly, we present
the limitations of the approaches and discuss the integration of the processes. Then, we
describe our methodology and describe the selected case companies. We present our
findings through a preliminary model for Customer-Oriented Software Product
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Development and describe how the case companies have implemented it. After the
discussion section, conclusions and the future research topics are presented.
2. New Product Development Process The NPD literature has extensively argued for the integration of R&D functions and
marketing to have a successful new product development environment for a firm (Souder,
1988). Griffin and Hauser (1996) have found two distinguishing topics in the NPD
literature. The first is the physical integration of people by location and organizational
structure. The second is the process perspective. On the basis of the empirical studies, the
authors point out the importance of the well-structured process and list some good
examples, such as Cooper’s StageGate model (Cooper, 1990). Additionally, Voss (1985)
has studied the critical success factors for the development of software applications and
argued for good process management. In this study, we focus on the process aspect of
NPD.
As going through the literature, we found the StageGate model (Cooper, 1990) to be one
of the most coherent for examining the whole NPD process. The process is a conceptual
and operational road map for moving a project from idea to launch. The purpose is to
improve effectiveness and efficiency of the product. Even though, the StageGate model
may not provide solutions for every problem (Griffin and Hauser, 1996), the other
models, for example Quality Function Deployment (Haag et al., 1996) and the user
involvement in the process, concentrate only on some of the phases of the whole. We did
found other models within the NPD literature, such as Ambler and Styles’s (Ambler and
Styles, 1997), but we did not find these to be relevantly different than this widely used
StageGate model introduced by Cooper (1990).
Figure 2 illustrates the StageGate model. The process description is simplified to five
stages that present the major events in the NPD process (Cooper, 2000). Stages are cross-
functional, thus there is no R&D or marketing stage. Rather, each stage gradually drives
down the business risk by gathering vital information on technology, market, finance and
operations. The gates between stages serve as the quality-control checkpoints.
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STAGE 1Customer value criteria
Preliminary market, technical& financial assessments
Action plan
STAGE 2User needs & wants study
Competitive analysisValue proposition defined
Technical feasibilityOperations assessment
Product definitionFinancial analysis
STAGE 3Preliminary market, technical
& financial assessmentsAction plan
STAGE 4Extended in-house testing
Customer field trialsTest market/trial sellFinalized launch and
operations plansPost launch & life cycle plans
STAGE 5Market launch & roll-out
Full production/operationsSelling begun
Results monitoringPost lauch & life cycle plans
under way
GATE 1Idea screen
GATE 2Second screen
GATE 3Decision to develop
GATE 4Decision to test
GATE 5Decision to launch
SCOPING BUILDING BUSINESSCASE DEVELOPMENT TESTING & VALIDATION LAUNCH
Figure 2. The Stage Gate model, modified from Cooper (2000).
Improved design and execution of NPD process minimizes the market risk by building in
the voice of the customer and focusing on the market performance of a product. For this
purpose, Cooper (Cooper, 2000) presents several key success factors that as incorporated
into the process minimize the product failure rate in the markets. Developing
differentiated, superior products means conducting a user needs-and-wants study early in
product development process in order to identify the components of a superior product. In
highly networked software industry, this might also mean tight cooperation with the
network parties who provide the knowledge of end-users. Furthermore, allocating more
time and resources on the activities preceding the design and development means
undertaking market and competitive analysis, concept testing and feasibility technical
assessments. Before the development stage, the StateGate process drives the focus on a
product definition which includes a target market definition, a product concept
comprising benefits to be delivered, the positioning strategy and more specific product
features and attributes. Additionally, the StageGate process gives attention early to the
market launch. One of the most important aspects of the StageGate process is that it
involves all process stakeholders, such as the top management, sales and engineering
functions, customers, suppliers, and partners in the product development.
In the following section, we examine how IS discipline has seen the development process
of new products and services.
3. Software Development Process In IS development discipline, the process development has been moving on the timeline
starting from disorganized ways of working and developing towards more organized
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ways. Also the shift from sequential process models to evolutionary ones is evident. We
start our review with the oldest of development methods, code-and-fix, which includes
two steps in the process: 1) write code, and 2) test and fix it (Boehm, 1988). The resulting
product is reworked until it is in an acceptable stage (Boehm et al., 1984). The method
contains many problems with starting poorly understood requirements and problematical
structure of coding resulting high costs when re-work is needed later on (Boehm, 1988).
The first published model ‘waterfall model’ for software development was derived from
other engineering processes (Royce, 1970). It is a systematic, sequential approach, in
which each stage requires well-defined input, and results in well-defined outcomes. The
IS product is not delivered until the whole linear sequence has been completed. The
problems related to this linear model are stagnant requirements and badly structured
programming, which have been tried to avoid by including overlapping between stages
(Sommerville, 2001).
In contrast to the waterfall model, an evolutionary approach to software development is
often more effective in producing systems which meet the immediate need of customers
(Sommerville, 2001). In the evolutionary approach, the specification is developed
incrementally and reflecting users’ understanding of the problem (Sommerville, 2001).
Through this discourse, process models based on reuse-oriented development,
prototyping, increments, and spiral development have evolved. However, the
evolutionary approach has some problems. It is only an abstract representation, and thus
the process is not visible and systems often lack proper structure why special tools and
techniques may be required (Sommerville, 2001). Therefore, the evolutionary
development suites best small systems with a fairly short lifetime, as the problems
become acute in large systems.
In the evolutionary approach, reuse is often seen as essential for rapid system
development. In the past few years, an approach to component-based software
engineering has become increasingly popular. Also SEI has taken this into account and
has targeted the latest CMMI version 1.1 to integrated product and process development
(Software Engineering Institute, 2002). The engineering process areas of the CMMI
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support component-based software development by emphasizing concurrent development
and focusing on all phases of the product’s life.
Furthermore, there is need to support process iteration where parts of the process are
repeated as system requirements evolve. The models for this purpose comprise
incremental development and spiral development. In incremental development software
is developed in small but usable pieces that can be delivered to a customer. Each
increment is an operative subset of the system and builds on the increments that have
already been developed (Pressman, 2000). Detailed design, coding, and testing occur
within these separate stages (McConnell, 1986). The process of development, validation
and integration continues until the delivered increments form a complete product.
In turn, the spiral development (Boehm, 1988) describes the software process as a spiral,
where each of the loops can be considered to represent, for example, one fundamental
step of the software process. Thus, the innermost loop might be concerned with
requirements engineering, the next with risk analysis that is followed by prototyping and
validating the found requirements. After one round the loop continues with a more
detailed abstraction level ending to the detailed design process, and finally
implementation. The spiral model assumes a risk-driven approach to the software
development rather than a primarily document-driven (waterfall) or code-driven
(prototyping) approach. Each cycle incrementally increases the degree of the system
definition and at the same time decreases the degree of technology risk (Boehm, 1988).
Next, we discuss the limitations of the NPD and IS development approaches.
4. Limitations of the Approaches Often the reason for the market failure of high technology products is the lack of
marketing knowledge and skills (Calantone and Cooper, 1981; Peffers and Tuunanen,
2002; Sigvartsen, 2001). Returning this, the StageGate model builds the success into the
process by designing a certain stage to gather information in order to lower the business
risk. Each stage cost more than the previous one, so that the model is based on
incremental commitments.
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In IS field, the process management focuses on identifying risks and drawing up plans to
minimize their effect on the project. The IS literature specifies several main causes for
uncertainty in software development, for example people management (Sommerville,
2001), limited learning and knowledge management skills of software organization
(Mathiassen et al., 2001), failures in software cost estimation (Boehm et al., 1995), and
improper quality management. Generally, the recognized risk categories are project risks
that affect project schedule and resources, and product risks, that affect quality or
performance of the software being developed. Business risks affect the organization
developing the software (Sommerville, 2001), which indicates that business risk
management is not incorporated as such into software process models.
Presenting the limitations of the existing approaches, we assert that the integration of
both of the disciplines provides answers for creating customer-centric software products.
Because of the special nature of software product development for service providers of
the consumer markets, there is a need to justify the innovation process stage decision by
continuously evolving discourse by the involved parties. Then, gathered information
drives down both the technical and business risk.
5. Case Studies in Software Industry
Methodology We followed Klein and Myers (1999) in trying to understand the complex and fast
moving IS research topic. Hence, we chose a qualitative research approach. For the
purpose of developing the preliminary framework for customer oriented software product
development, we studied two new software product companies in Finland. We selected
the case study method because of its major strength in using many sources of evidence
and data collection methods (Eisenhardt, 1989; Wynn, 2001; Yin, 1994). Multiple
sources of evidence and multiple methods provide a better validity for findings. Primary
data collection method used in this study was theme interviews. We complemented this
by acquiring other written documents and information from the case companies. The
selected two cases are based on a convenience sample. However, we claim that they can
be used as illustrative examples of small and medium size companies developing mobile
software products.
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The data collection was conducted in spring and summer 2003. At first, we gathered
background information of the companies, such as financial information from 2000 to
2003, the future estimates for 2004, a strategy and an operating plans, an organization
structure, and product white papers, to better define the units of analysis. Then, we
conducted theme interviews to have an insight of business and technology management
in the companies. These resulted up to a hundred pages of research notes1.
We chose two types of participants for the theme interviews. The CEO or the head of
business development answered the questions which focused on management, business
development and marketing issues. The head of software development or the head of
technology gave us details concerning software development practices. Finally, we tried
to gain insight of the activities of NPD and software engineering on the basis of our
theoretical discussion.
The Selected Companies The selected companies operate in the mobile and wireless markets and the products are
used by wide audience end-users, and thus the cases are good and suitable examples to be
presented in this paper. Both companies have a strong growth initiative, which has also
been a reason for venture capitalists to make investments in the companies. The
companies differ from one another in terms of the development stage of a business; one
(Multimedia) is a start-up established 2001 that has just recently started to
commercialize the first version of a product, and the other (Messaging) has already made
four versions during six financial years. In 2003, the turnover of Multimedia was 2.5
million euros and it had 62 employees. The comparable figures of Messaging were 5
million euros and 65. By studying these two chosen companies, we were able to analyze
the integration of marketing and R&D in two slightly different business contexts. The
selected cases were named as Multimedia and Messaging after their product offerings.
Messaging has a middleware solution that enables mobile operators to increase the
control in wireless content business. Their product allows mobile operator and service
providers to manage the process of provisioning, delivering, and charging of a service
portfolio. It includes standard tools for integration to billing systems, subscriber, location, 1 The detailed themes of interviews are attached in Appendix 1
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and service databases. Multimedia’s product, the Multimedia Framework, is a complete
system incorporating all technology required in implementing mobile video applications.
It consists of modules implementing the elementary functions such as video/audio coding
and protocols and of a virtual backplane providing the signaling and control for the
applications. The framework supports a variety hardware and software platforms and is a
suitable solution for mobile devices ranging from cellular phones to digital cameras.
Customer segments of the companies consist of component suppliers, device and phone
manufacturers, operators, and service providers. From the competitive perspective, both
companies try to operate as a pioneer in their specific field. Both of them also support
newest technological innovations for the sake of the future roadmap but as the chairman
of the board of Messaging summarizes: “We do not take risks as regards immature
technological trends.” Also the CEO of Multimedia concludes: “The failures in product
functionality would mean the loss of customers and the end of business, why we use only
proven technology.”
The business model2 of both companies is based on licenses, consultation and
implementation services, and product support fees. Messaging’s business is divided
equally into three parts, but Multimedia’s turnover mainly consists of license revenues
and product royalties. Multimedia’s business is only emerging, and for this reason, there
is yet no need to establish support services. Messaging has already three profitable sales
channels, but Multimedia has only closed the first deals with potential partners in this
year. Both of them have ten to twenty main competitors around the world.
6. Findings We conceptualized our findings in figure 3. The new product development process is
illustrated with the help of the StageGate model (Cooper, 1990) and it focuses on product
characteristics from the business and marketing perspective. The software development
process (Sommerville, 2001) focuses on the technology risk. In the chosen companies,
both of the processes are based on an evolutionary approach meaning that as product
2 The business model discussion is a thriving area in IS, but not in the scope of our paper. More information on business models can be attained: Timmers, P. (1999) Electronic commerce : strategies and models for business-to-business trading. Chichester ; New York: Wiley.
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definitions become sharp and completed new software features are developed and
implemented by increments. In following we go through the presented model. We
illustrate the model by describing first how the NPD processes of the case companies
from marketing perspective. Then we continue with the software development processes
of the companies. Finally, we describe the integration of the StageGate (Cooper, 1990)
and software development processes (Sommerville, 2001) in the case companies.
Figure 3 Customer-Oriented Software Product Development Model
New Product Development From marketing perspective, the product innovation of the companies is controlled by a
NPD process. In this study it is conceptualized with the help of the StageGate model. In
both of the companies, the cross-functional and parallel stages are preceded by
Go/Kill/Hold/Recycle decision points, which support the evolutionary nature of the
process.
Scoping. Second screen. “The management group decides whether the idea merits any
work. There is no a certain procedure for an agenda, on the contrary, the meetings are
simple and relaxed. For example, last time we rented a cottage in Lapland for a weekend
and did not come back until we had finalized the plans,” said the CEO of Multimedia.
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“Information for idea screen and scoping is collected by communicating with our
network partners such as component suppliers, phone manufacturers, operators and
technology partners,” he continued.
Quite on the opposite, Messaging screens various sources, such as customers, partners
and competitive environment through competitor offers and market follow-up. Customer
feedback is collected through a digital channel and stored into a database. The responses
are given priorities according to three levels and the results are reviewed regularly by the
management group and the product steering group. The groups also deal with discussions
with customers and partners. During recent years, the company has also conducted a
market research for their main customers. “We wanted to study the current market
situation, the future trends, and timing of those trends,” said the CTO of Messaging, “On
the basis of the results, we adjusted our plans. We will repeat the research yearly.”
Whether the idea seemed to justify more extensive investigation, the management group
decided to explore the business case. In both of the companies, there was no a clear
boundary between the first and the second stage.
Building business case, Decision to develop. A common method to complete a product
definition in both companies was to review plans with customers and network partners.
“We throw the ball to our customers and partners and refine the idea with them. Actually,
we have formed few partnerships for the sake of getting a better access to this market
knowledge,” said the CEO of Multimedia. Also salesmen of Messaging asked customers:
“Would you like this kind of feature..?”
“We make these normal analyses such as product life cycle analysis, cost estimations,
market research, and sales estimates,” stated the CEO of Multimedia. However, one of
the most significant outcomes of both companies was a product positioning that related
the value added to the ones offered by partner network. “That way, we don’t step on
anyone’s toes and strengthen our position compared to competitors’,” said the CEO of
Multimedia.
Overall, there was no significant variation between the explicit results of this stage in the
companies. Only existing difference was the amount of information processed, on which
the decision to develop was based. In other words, Messaging examined the business case
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from several angles and with numerous iterations. The management group went through
the feasibility analysis several times. The business case was verified sound if the project
aligned with the business’s strategy and the product provided distinct value to customers.
Development, Decision to test. After examining the technological feasibility of the
solution, companies started to the develop process, which is described in detail in the next
section. Hence, we move to the next phase: decision to test.
There was no a clear point when to make a decision to test, rather the procedure was
evolutionary. As product components were completed, they were gradually transferred to
in-house testing and customer trials. And, as both the CTO of Messaging and the CEO of
Multimedia noted: “When development begins, the salesmen start to sell the product.”
Testing and validation, Decision to launch. In both of the companies this stage of NPD
process was highly overlapping with the previous one. The responsibility of software
testing was carried by the software engineers. However, after verifying technological
feasibility, the companies tested the usability, appropriateness and efficiency of product
features by delivering demo versions to certain customers. “Yet, installing demos require
the same amount of work than normal product implementation, so it is not very easy way
of doing customer trials,” the CEO of Multimedia pointed out.
“Development and validation activities are carried out concurrently with rapid feedback
across these activities,” described the head of software engineering of Messaging, “And
finally me make the decision to start selling the update.” The extent of testing and
validation of product innovation was larger in Messaging because they had the possibility
to exploit more parties in feedback gathering. “Our customer base is small, so we deliver
only two or three demos. But it is enough for us,” ascertained the CEO of Multimedia.
Launch, Post-launch review. “There is no such a thigh as a product launch,” said
respondents from both of the companies. However, “We try to set the time of the market
launch with the most significant industry fairs, such as GSM World or Cannes,”
explained the CTO of Messaging. This was also an effort in Multimedia. In other
respects, salesmen just begin to sell a new update or a product version. However,
delivering updates was performed carefully. “Customers can’t digest too heavy updates,”
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concluded the CTO of Messaging. Finally, the results of the launch were monitored and
used for the future developments.
Software development In both of the companies, the software development was based on reusable components.
“This is incremental development,” the head of technology of Messaging said, “When
there is a new feature, we complete a new increment iteratively. An each increment
provides a subset of the total system and integration with existing increments.” In both
companies, reuse was considered essential for rapid system development. “Mainly, our
software development is just making updates of existing components,” described the head
of technology of Messaging, “The market develops so fast that for example capacity
requirements have multiplied. Actually, we have developed the central parts of our SMS
gateway tens of times.” Sometimes these components are systems in their own right that
provide specific functionality such as picture formatting, message sending, or traffic
monitoring.
The component based development influenced the software development process models
of the companies. The CMMI (Software Engineering Institute, 2002) software
development model is used to illustrate this in Figure 3. It includes five iterative and
looping phases: 1) requirements development, 2) technical solution, 3) product
integration, 4) verification, and 5) validation. Due component based development, the
finalization level of a product was high in both companies. Generally, the final products
consist of two to ten application modules and from twenty to thirty platform components.
When the customer places an order, the product is already 90% ready-made. 10% of the
work consists of integrating the components into a final product. There were no major
differences in the technological assembly between the companies. However, there was a
difference in how they have implemented CMMI model.
The major difference was in the requirements development phase that was closely linked
to scoping and business case building in NPD process. Messaging’s requirements
development approach was clearly more structured. In turn, Multimedia invested more in
exploring product requirements and understanding the customers’ needs. Messaging’s
requirements development (e.g. specification) was comparable with other common
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processes models, like waterfall. However, the intermediate stages include also
component analysis and integration to the system originating from CMMI. “The process
reflects the incremental structure of the product, “said the head of technology. In
addition, Messaging had divided the development organization into five teams that focus
on certain components or stages of the process.
On the contrary, software engineers of Multimedia worked more with customers and
partners to explore the feasibility of requirements and to deliver final system. Their
process model is flexible and has only abstract stages of design, development,
verification, integration, and validation. “Small chaos is necessary”, said the CEO of
Multimedia, “But documentation and version management are performed very properly.”
Both companies produced a new version of the product every year.
Messaging systematically collected information from several sources, such as customers
and partners, that made the process more structured. “Every requirement comes from the
customers,” described the CTO of Messaging. Unlike Messaging, Multimedia’s offering
is based on technology push because of the emerging market. The company had no
systematic information management to forecast end-users’ needs and wants, and as the
CEO of Multimedia summarized: “The product definition is based on intuition of the
management group and some discussions with network partners. We do not have any link
to end-users.”
Rapid prototypes (McConnell, 1986) were common in both companies. “We develop a
prototype, but actually it serves more salesmen than software engineers. It is not
productive to present a piece of code to anyone, but we have to conceptualize the product
in order to collect the initial customer feedback. Otherwise, it is difficult to transmit an
image of the product concept,” said the CTO of Messaging, “We experiment the
prototypes especially when users’ needs and wants are not well understood.”
The Integration of Software Development and Marketing – Requirements Management We found that the integrative thing between software development and marketing (NPD
process) was requirements management. We consider it best describes the
transformation of customer needs to technical specifications that was occurring in the
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case companies. Requirements management was the glue that attached together the two
processes and the people. The customer focus was derived from NPD work, whereas
software development provided the actual means to build the product.
The integration of the two processes was characteristic in two parts of the model. Figure
3 describes these as double arrows. First integration was evident during scoping and
business case building and requirements development. In both cases this loop, or even a
pump, provided the needed information for NPD and software development processes to
continue forward. Management tried to listen to customers and, in turn, software
engineers start to developing technical requirements as stated by product definitions.
“All of the product requirements come from the ones who talk with customers, we
(software developers) just concentrates on developing those features and
producing quality software,” stated the head of software engineering of
Messaging.
The second integrative loop was with testing & validation and launch and product
integration. The testing & validation were heavily overlapped with software
development’s product integration, verification and validation. The participants were not
able to separate these two in practice, but they saw these as one. Similarly, the launch of
the product was tightly integrated to the previous, which, of course, is hardly a surprise.
In following we describe how the organizations dealt these two loops, or pumps, in
practice.
In managerial level, there was a difference between the amounts of integrative functions
in the companies. Whereas Messaging had clearly more managed functions, which are
instantiated by an individual project, group, or organizational function, Multimedia had
only one. The function existing in both companies was the management group. “The new
product development is purely a synonym to the management group work,” was the case
in both companies. The management groups of the companies consist of delegates from
all the main functions.
Messaging had specific product development functions, such as a product steering group
that consists eight to ten members from sales and engineering, and with which Messaging
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manages the co-operation between sales and engineering. The head of business
development and the leader of the group concluded that
“The product steering group has regular meetings and we gather information from
various sources. The sources are for example a yearly customer survey and
customer feedback collected by sales team. Finally, we analyze the data and
present the results to the management group,”
In Messaging, customers were served by account managers from both sales and
technology. There were also two product managers led by a product director operating
between engineering and sales and providing resources to development teams.
In contrast to Messaging’s product-lead organization, Multimedia’s organizational
structure is divided simply into the management, sales, and engineering. About 50 out of
62 employees belonged to engineering. “We are just ramping up the sales for our
product,” said the CEO of Multimedia, “And now we try to hire a marketing director and
few more salesmen.” The management group that is the only integrative function
between sales and engineering, had meetings twice in a month. “There are also meetings
in every three months that serve as summary points,” added the CEO. “In the
management group, there are all important people of the company making decisions,” he
concluded, “Such as the CEO, the head of sales and marketing, the CTO, the head of
software engineering, and the head of business development. But being a small firm, we
communicate every day around the coffee table.” However, this tacit knowledge is
incomplete to manage integrative activities as being only partially performed and not
planned.
7. Discussion We argue that our preliminary model can provide a solution to the gap of integrating
R&D and marketing, particularly in software companies operating in mobile and
wireless. We found that the reviewed literature in NPD and in IS development gave us
good grounds to form a preliminary understanding of the process model for Customer-
Oriented Software Product Development Model.
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We found that that there is no a single process for developing new software products, but
instead, the NPD process is tightly integrated to software development process. The
findings present how the framework is distinctly divided into parts accordingly how it
deals with project risks. The evolutionary NPD stream, based on the StageGate (Cooper,
1990), is argued to manage the business risks, whereas the incremental software
development process considers the technology risks. We also found that the NPD process
is mainly driven by the management group, and that the software development is
controlled through it. The product definition is developed in NDP process and transmitted
to software development, which focuses on requirements development, technological
solution, verification, component integration, and validation.
Even though the stages of both processes exist in both companies, we found that as a
company and the market matures, the process framework becomes more evident and
structured. Additionally, not so start-up companies can invest more resources in
completing a product definition, which is seen in Messaging’s case. Furthermore,
listening to the voice of the customer (Griffin and Hauser, 1993) became more systematic
in NPD in forms of a product steering group, product managers, customer surveys,
gathering feedback from lead users, and working with network partners. An additional
finding was that both companies considered that a small chaos in the development is
needed to create innovations. Although both companies drove towards organized
processes, it is necessary not to kill all ideas by structuring the processes too much.
8. Conclusion We found that our findings support the previous claims asserted within NPD literature
(Barczak, 1995; Gupta, 1985; Souder, 1988). The findings clearly showed the need of
integrating R&D and marketing to software development in order to decrease the
business and technical risks in NPD. However, we claim that no model has been
presented for managing this integration.
To fill this gap, we used Nambisan’s (2003) idea of using IS as a reference discipline to
extend the already created understanding in NPD. We found that the process literature for
developing information systems would add a contribution to the area. By doing case
studies we found that the integration of the process models in both NPD and software
18
development is essential. With this paper, we present a preliminary model of Customer-
Oriented Software Product Development that fills the presented gap.
We argue that our model brings contribution to researchers and practitioners alike. For
academia, we present a way to bring closer NPD and IS research communities and thus
create new knowledge in managing software product development. Secondly, the
proposed model can decrease the risk of development failure for IS products. For
practitioners, our research brings more understanding of how the product development
can be organized to decrease the development risk for software products. Our model
presents a way to manage the NPD process and how integrate it to the software
development. Furthermore, we claim that our model also gives a recommendation of how
to organize the NPD of a small and medium sized software company.
In the future, we seek to study more deeply how the integration phases of the model work
and how this relates to research in requirements engineering discipline. We also see that
more research should be done in validating our model. Our case studies show only
preliminary results. We plan to continue our research with a quantitative approach.
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Appendix 1
New products development strategy:
How would you characterize your new product strategy?
How many competitors you have? Who are they?
How often you launch new products or product versions?
New product development process:
How do you generate ideas for new products?
How do you screen ideas?
How do you test the feasibility of the requirements?
How do you perform concept definition and testing?
How do you perform business analysis?
Do you develop in-house prototype?
How do you perform market testing?
How do you perform market introduction?
Who are involved in the NPD activities in each phase?
What is the structure for the new product development in your company?
What are the roles of the parties involved in the process?
Who is in charge managing the NPD process in your company?
How is the process organized?
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How do you combine R&D with marketing?
How do the development team and marketing people cooperate?
Software development process:
What software development approaches you use in your company?
Do you have specific methods?
What phases the process includes?
Who are involved in the process?
How do you organize software development?
Would you describe your software development more like a chaotic process or very
organized one? Why?
Do you have quality systems for software development? If so, what specifications are
used?
How do you manage requirements?
How do perform requirements development?
How do you document the requirements and system specification?
How do you perform verification and validation?
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