For software vendors the processes of release, delivery, and deployment to customers are inherently complex. However, software vendors can greatly improve their product quality and quality of service by applying a model that focuses on customer interaction if such a model were available. This paper presents a model for customer configuration updating (CCU) that can evaluate the capabilities of a software vendor in these processes. Eight extensive case studies of medium to large product software vendors are presented and evaluated using the model, thereby uncovering issues in their release, delivery, and deployment processes. Finally, organisational and architectural changes are proposed to increase quality of service and product quality for software vendors.

The benefits that a software organization obtains from estimates of product quality are dependent upon how early in the product cycle that these estimates are available. Early estimation of software quality can help organizations make informed decisions about corrective actions. To provide such early estimates we present an empirical case study of two large scale commercial operating systems, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. In particular, we leverage various historical in-process and product metrics from Windows XP binaries to create statistical predictors to estimate the post-release failures/failure-proneness of Windows Server 2003 binaries. These models estimate the failures and failure-proneness of Windows Server 2003 binaries at statistically significant levels. Our study is unique in showing that historical predictors for a software product line can be useful, even at the very large scale of the Windows operating system. 1.

For software vendors the processes of release, delivery, and deployment to customers are inherently complex. However, software vendors can greatly improve their product quality and quality of service by applying a model that focuses on customer interaction if such a model were available. This paper presents a model for customer configuration updating (CCU) that can evaluate the capabilities of a software vendor in these processes. Eight extensive case studies of medium to large product software vendors are presented and evaluated using the model, thereby uncovering issues in their release, delivery, and deployment processes.

The implementation and continuous support of a software product at a customer with evolving requirements is a complex task for a product software vendor. There are many customers for the vendor to serve, all of whom might require their own version or variant of the application. Furthermore, the software application itself will consist of many (software) components that depend on each other to function correctly. On top of that, these components will evolve over time to meet the changing needs of customers. To alleviate this problem we propose to alleviate the software release and deployment effort and reduce risks associated with it. This will be achieved by explicitly managing typical knowledge about the software product, such as configuration and dependency information, thereby allowing software vendors to improve the customer configuration updating process. The proposed solution of knowledge management at both the customer and vendor site, is validated through industrial case studies.