Combining Monitoring and AutonomousFeedback Requests to Elicit Actionable Knowledge of System Use

[Context and motivation] To validate developers’ ideas of what users might want and to understand user needs, it has been proposed to collect and combine system monitoring with user feedback. [Question/problem] So far, the monitoring data and feedback have been collected passively, hoping for the users to get active when problems emerge. This approach leaves unexplored opportunities for system improvement when users are also passive or do not know that they are invited to offer feedback. [Principal ideas/results] In this paper, we show how we have used goal monitors to identify interesting situations of system use and let a system autonomously elicit user feedback in these situations. We have used a monitor to detect interesting situations in the use of a system and issued automated requests for user feedback to interpret the monitoring observations from the users’ perspectives. [Contribution] The paper describes the implementation of our approach in a Smart City system and reports our results and experiences. It shows that combining system monitoring with proactive, autonomous feedback collection was useful and surfaced knowledge of system use that was relevant for system maintenance and evolution. The results were helpful for the city to adapt and improve the Smart City application and to maintain their internet-of-things deployment of sensors

Framework for implementing product portfolio management in software business

Whether a software product company takes up a project depends on the strategic decisions that are made with regard to an organization's products. A software project needs to fit strategic goals and enable an organization to realize a vision through its software products. Making decisions on a strategic level, however, requires information of several related topics including technological trends and the product's life cycle and surpasses the scope of an individual software project. Instead, these decisions are made on the level of the product portfolio. Product Portfolio Management (PPM) holds that an organization has to manage investment decisions over time following profit and risk criteria. Given the multitude of relevant topics and the interrelatedness between these topics, it has proven difficult to implement PPM processes in software businesses. To this end, we created the Portfolio Implementation Framework (PIF) consisting of (a) a competence model, giving an overview of the critical topics; (b) process-deliverable diagrams, which provide an implementation path for product portfolio management processes; and (c) a maturity matrix that comprises 32 capabilities, which should be realized during implementation. The maturity matrix also serves as an instrument for industry to assess, compare and improve portfolio management processes across organizations. The framework provides a holistic view on a step-by-step PPM process implementation and has proved its applicability in practice

Customer is King? A Framework to Shift from Cost- to Value-Based Pricing in Software as a Service: The Case of Business Intelligence Software

Part 1: Digital ServicesInternational audienceWith a shift from the purchase of a product to the delivery of a service, cloud computing has revolutionized the software industry. Its cost structure has changed with the introduction of Software as a Service (SaaS), resulting in decreasing variable costs and necessary amendments to the software vendors’ pricing models. In order to justify the gap between the software’s price and the incremental cost of adding a new customer, it is essential for the vendor to focus on the added value for the client. This shift from cost- to value-based pricing models has so far not been thoroughly studied. Through literature review and expert interviews, a conceptual model for customer-centric SaaS pricing, especially Business Intelligence & Business Analytics tools, has been developed. The model has then been initially validated by discussions with the top five software players in this realm and builds a strong basis for further theoretical inquiry and practical application