SUMMARYHigh-tech companies conducting product development need to collect and analyze requirements effectively, plan and implement releases, and allocate requirements to appropriate releases. Requirements and release management are complicated because development activities typically are scattered across multiple sites, involve multiple partners in different countries, leverage various development methods and tools, and are realized through various organizational arrangements such as release projects in organizations structured around products and permanent release teams in organizations responsible for the long-term development and maintenance of strategic software and hardware assets. Flexible, scalable, and secure groupwarebased support for the activities provides substantial payoffs. Yet, the extant literature provides little theoretical guidance for designing and using requirements and release management systems (RRMS) in multi-site, multi-partner environments. This article develops the meta-requirements and a meta-design of an Information Systems Design Product Theory for the class of RRMS based on a case study in a global company and a literature review. The theory is scalable to meet the needs of global companies but simple enough so that small and medium-sized companies can also leverage it to implement requirements and release management solutions.
UML models are widely used in software product line engineering for activities such as modeling the software product line reference architecture, detailed design, and automation of software code generation and testing. But in high-tech companies, modeling activities are typically distributed across multiple sites and involve multiple partners in different countries, thus complicating model management. Today's UML modeling tools support sophisticated version management for managing parallel and distributed modeling. However, the literature does not provide a comprehensive set of industrial-level criteria to evaluate the version management capabilities of UML tools. This article's contribution is a framework for evaluating the version management features of UML modeling tools for multi-site, multi-partner software product line organizations.
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