Managing change in software development

Abstract. The software practices used to develop software systems emerge under the influence of a number of factors, including such factors as culture, size and criticality. These factors will change over time and the change must therefore be managed. Software practices that have emerged under the influence of factors that later has changed have to be adopted to reflect the change of influencing factors and thereby the context of a development project. Web applications are no exception and are operated in a changing environment. The continuous change takes place both with respect to their functionality, the technology used to implement an application, the development practices applied to develop them, and the environment they are deployed into. Managing the changing environment is a key factor to success. To be successful, change has to be coped with continuously. This paper proposes a subprocess to manage the changing environment of software applications and their development activities in a continuously way, using mostly qualitative information.