A Process Model and Typology for Software Product Updaters

Abstract

Product software is constantly evolving through extensions, maintenance, changing requirements, changes in configuration settings, and changing licensing information. Managing evolution of released and deployed product software is a complex and often underestimated problem that has been the cause of many difficulties for both software vendors and customers. This paper presents a process model and typology to characterize techniques that support product software update methods. Also, this paper assesses and surveys a variety of existing techniques against the characterisation framework and lists unsolved problems related to software product updaters.

Modelling Deployment Using Feature Descriptions and State Models for Component-Based Software Product Families

“…Such functionality, of which none of previously evaluated systems above provide it [5], requires a central knowledge base that stores the variables that initialize the different varieties of component instances and a categorization of such knowledge. This paper presents a modelling technique that can support the deployment of a component in different versions and variants, and still guarantee consistency and correctness.…”

“…Current component lifecycle management systems, however, do not support different component (lifecycle) types, variability, component evolution, and are not feature driven. One of the main reasons for initiating this research is that the current tools for component deployment [5] do not take into account both variability, different types of distribution (source, binary, packaged), and different binding times.…”

“…Most models used by conventional technology [5] such as InstallShield and RPM-Update, focus on the artefacts that make up a component. Next to that these technologies perform some very general dependency resolution and only support the "Requires Always" relationship.…”

Integrated development and maintenance of software products to support efficient updating of customer configurations: a case study in mass market ERP software

“…Others, such as [13] and [16] emphasize the need for explicit knowledge management during development and maintenance. The process and evaluation of software product updating have been recorded in [10], including an evaluation of Exact's Product Updater.…”

“…The fact that mandatory deliverables are stored in a list, and their sources are children of these deliverables, means that the dependencies amongst deliverables are not explicitly stored. The ES Product Updater [10] uses the list of deliverables for products to compare that to the list of installed files at the customer. The solution implemented by ES, where one product is configured to serve different purposes, is cheaper than implementing a full product line at this scale [8].…”