IWSPM 2009

The success of any software intensive product depends on skilled and competent product management. In essence, a product manager decides what functionality and quality a product should offer, to which customers, and when in time, while assuring a winning business case.

Software product management includes work with requirements, release definitions, product release lifecycles, the creation and interpretation of product strategies, balancing long-term technology push with shorter-term market-pull, and assuring a winning business case by selecting the right requirement for realization. Indeed software product management is complex: there are many intra- and inter-organizational stakeholders, many responsibilities and no formalized education or body of (scientific) knowledge.

Software product management is not only relevant for pure software companies and companies that develop software intensive systems, but also for companies that provide services to customers using long-lived software infrastructures.

After the success of the first two workshops collocated with the recent RE conferences this workshop aims at bringing practitioners and research experts together for exchanging ideas and experience and for setting the research agenda based on industry needs.

Workshop Objectives

IWSPM 2009 pursues the following objectives:

1. Build upon the body of knowledge in software product management, and identify challenges and future avenues for research relevant for both academia and industry.

2. Establish software product management as a research field within the greater field of software engineering and management.

3. Provide to software product managers and researchers a dedicated forum for exchanging ideas and best practices and thus foster industry-academia collaboration.

Topics of Interest

Submitted papers shall address topics of interest to software product management. Topics of interest include, but are certainly not limited to:

- Product management practices in software, software intensive systems, and IT domains
- Requirements engineering in relation to product management
- Large-scale requirements handling and requirements triage
- Product strategy definition and marketing
- Release definition and roadmapping
- Product management processes
- Product families and product line management
- Portfolio management and product life-cycle management
- Innovation Management for Software Products
- Subcontracting, partnering and incorporation of open-source components
- Software supply networks and Software ecosystems
- Service as a software product
- Measuring and improving the performance of the product manager
- Product management skill and competence building
- Alignment of product development with company and market needs
- Business case development
- Negotiation, coordination, and control
- Product management at SME’s
- Tools for product management