Software organizations evolve and maintain software solutions with more than a single development project. The delta specifications and artifacts that result from each project make reuse difficult and challenge a company's ability to innovate. Software product management is a growing discipline for understanding how to productize and align software with company strategy, how to evolve software, and how to coordinate product stakeholders. With product focus, in addition to project focus, planning accuracy can be improved, time-to-market reduced, product quality enhanced, and economic success sustained. This chapter provides an overview on software product management and discusses what today is known about this discipline.In modern economy the companies that succeed and survive are those able to develop and market winning products. Products like phones, cars, and airplanes are increasingly software-based, rather than being electro-mechanical devices. Services like banking, information provision, and entertainment and infrastructure like telecommunications and power networks gradually tend to be run more by software products than by humans. Software is an increasingly important enabler and driver of innovation because of its adaptability and flexibility. At the same time, software allows cutting cost, reducing time, and increasing reliability of services that earlier were performed by humans, enabling humans to focus on complex and little repetitive tasks.
In this article we revisit some core concepts of the FRISCO report related to semiotics and the philosophical foundations of FRISCO. Starting from some earlier versions of the semiotic triangle we focus on its top comer labelled "conception" in its FRISCO version. The notion of conception (which is most fundamental for the whole framework) has been (and still is) a source of many controversies. It is indeed problematic when it is seen from a pure mentalistic point of view or introduced via terms of perception psychology. However, if we apply the constructivist principles in a systematic way and associate conceptions rather with social groups than with individual observers, they become "social constructs" and thus objective and operational, i.e. verifiable or at least reconstructable by applying laws and rules. As a consequence, some circular definitions in the present report can be removed and the FRISCO basis be stabilised.
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