The W-Process for Software Product Evaluation: A Method for Goal-Oriented Implementation of the ISO 14598 Standard

The importance of software product evaluations will grow with the awareness of the need for better software quality. The process to conduct such evaluations is crucial to get evaluation results that can be applied and meet customers' expectations. This paper reviews a well-known evaluation process: the ISO 14598 standard. The review focuses on the difficulties in selecting and evaluating the appropriate evaluation techniques. The review shows that the standard has problems in applying evaluation processes in practice due to insufficient attention to goal definition and to relationships between activities being implicit. Also, the standard ignores the trade-off between goals and resources and pays insufficient attention to feedback. To address these deficiencies, the W-process is proposed. It extends the standard through an improved process structure and additional guidelines.     

Software engineering technology innovation - Turning research results into industrial success

This paper deals with the innovation of software engineering technologies. These technologies are methods and tools for conducting software development and maintenance. We consider innovation as a process consisting of two phases, being technology creation and technology transfer. In this paper, we focus mainly on the transfer phase.Technology transfer is of mutual interest to both academia and industry. Transfer is important for academia, because it shows the industrial relevance of their research results to, for example, their sponsoring authorities. Showing the industrial applicability of research results is sometimes referred to as valorization of research. Nowadays, valorization is often required by research funding bodies. The transfer is important for industries, because innovating their development processes and their products is supportive in gaining a competitive edge or remaining competitive in their business. We describe the technology transfer phase by means of three activities: technology evaluation, technology engineering, and technology embedding. The technology evaluation activity is perceived as the main gate between the technology creation phase and the technology transfer phase. With two case studies, originating from the Dutch high-tech systems industry, we will illustrate the activities in the transfer phase.In addition to the process we will also define the main roles in a software engineering technology innovation, namely: the technology provider (academic research, industrial research and technology vendor) and the technology receiver (industrial development). With those roles we also address the issues concerning the ownership of technologies.