A process approach for senior management involvement in software product development

Abstract: To make business of software product development it is important that the right software products are developed the right way. Today there are a number of software development models that support project management to successfully execute software development projects, but they typically do not ensure that the resulting software products will be successful from a business perspective. To achieve this senior management involvement is needed to meet business objectives and deliver sustained and actual benefits to the customer and the organization.This thesis presents one possibility to achieve effective senior management involvement in software product development projects by using stage-gate new product development models from traditional product development, and by suggesting a way to combine these models with contemporary software development models through pre-gate milestones.For verification, experiences from a corporate wide software platform deployment initiative are collected and discussed. The initiative used a stage-gate new product development model for project selection and steering, and an incremental software development model for project management and execution.