Dynamics of concurrent software development

Abstract

In a concurrent development process different releases of a software product overlap. Organizations involved in concurrent software development not only experience the dynamics common to single projects, but also face interactions between different releases of their product: they share resources among different stages of different projects, including customer support, they have a common code base and architecture that carries problems across releases, they use the same capabilities, and their market success in early releases impacts their resources in later ones. Drawing on two case studies we discuss some of the feedback processes central to concurrent software development and build a simple simulation model to analyze the resulting dynamics. This model sheds light on tipping dynamics, the nature of inter-project feedback loops, and alternative resource allocation policies relevant to management of concurrent software development.

Joint pricing and openness decisions in software markets with reinforcing loops

“…Second, after an initial investment period, introducing new features also depends on the profitability of the software. This formulation is consistent with empirical studies of software development organizations (Abdel‐Hamid and Madnick, ; Rahmandad and Weiss, ). The relative feature richness of the product impacts its consumers' utility.…”

Time pressure in software engineering: A systematic review

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A systematic literature review on the industrial use of software process simulation

“…Concurrent Projects: Two parallel projects have been simulated by [68], while multiple concurrent projects have been simulated by [140] and [130]. Table 8 shows the simulation approaches used by the identified studies.…”