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IBM owners who upgraded to PC‐DOS 4.0 may rightly whimper when confronted with software upgrades—and this time, thanks to System 7, Macintosh owners don't get to nod smugly either. Whether at the system level or in applications, software upgrades can reduce the most expert techie to tears of frustration. At least with hardware, the manufacturers don't send you notices that it's time to change to a new version for a modest additional fee. Software involves more frequent upgrades than hardware, but the choices are no less difficult. The author recounts some personal experiences and offers some guidelines that may or may not do you any good. The author also provides notes from July‐September 1991 PC literature. Other than the drum‐beating for DOS 5.0 (not cited here), it's been a mixed period: some interesting material with few breakthroughs.

In the current market scenario, software upgrades and updates have proved to be very handy in improving the reliability of the software in its operational phase. Software upgrades help in reinventing working software through major changes, like functionality addition, feature enhancement, structural changes, etc. In software updates, minor changes are undertaken which help in improving software performance by fixing bugs and security issues in the current version of the software. Through the current proposal, the authors wish to highlight the economic benefits of the combined use of upgrade and update service. A cost analysis model has been proposed for the same.

The article discusses a cost analysis model highlighting the distinction between launch time and time to end the testing process. The number of bugs which have to be catered in each release has been determined which also consists of the count of latent bugs of previous version. Convolution theory has been utilized to incorporate the joint role of tester and user in bug detection into the model. The cost incurred in debugging process was determined. An optimization model was designed which considers the reliability and budget constraints while minimizing the total debugging cost. This optimization was used to determine the release time and testing stop time.

The proposal is backed by real-life software bug dataset consisting of four releases. The model was able to successfully determine the ideal software release time and the testing stop time. An increased profit is generated by releasing the software earlier and continues testing long after its release.

The work contributes positively to the field by providing an effective optimization model, which was able to determine the economic benefit of the combined use of upgrade and update service. The model can be used by management to determine their timelines and cost that will be incurred depending on their product and available resources.

This article discusses the impact of information technology requirements on the costs of electronic libraries. The fast‐paced developments of technology require continual updating of hardware and software. Networking access consists of initial costs and recurring expenses. Electronic content, training, and support all demand ongoing expenditures. In this environment institutions must budget accordingly. One‐time outlays from grant‐funding agencies or parent institutions will not meet the demands of the information technology marketplace. This article asks key questions concerning hardware, software and network installation and upgrades and provides strategies for dealing with the needs for continuous funding and long‐term financing that are essential for keeping up with the requirements of the electronic library.

With the rapid development of cloud computing, most software firms face the significant choice of whether they should change the versioning strategy of enterprise software from releasing the on-premise version to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) version. Data being generated and hosted on SaaS vendors' servers brings multiple effects. It enables customers to enjoy the flexibility of accessing data and using the software remotely, named the “portability” effect. However, on the other hand, the cumulative data resources on the cloud also provide a clear target for external attacks, leading to the concern of information security. Considering these, the authors hope to offer insights for software firms by exploring the strategy selection problem.

Taking the portability effect and security risks of the SaaS licensing model into account, the authors develop a two-period model to figure out the market segmentation and identify the feasible conditions for employing three alternative strategies. Comparative statics analyses are conducted to explore the influencing mechanism of exogenous factors on strategy selection. The authors also discuss the strategy selection in the presence of the network effect and the security loss faced by users of on-premise software.

One significant finding is that the on-premise strategy can be excluded when the potential loss from security risks is small. Under this circumstance, the dual version strategy is optimal provided that the increase of customer valuation caused by portability effect is below a threshold. Otherwise, the SaaS strategy generates the highest profit. When the potential loss from security risks turns large, the on-premise strategy, the dual version strategy and the SaaS strategy are the optimal options in order as the portability effect on customer valuation gets stronger.

Previous literature has insufficiently addressed the versioning issue of enterprise software. In this paper, the distinctive features of the SaaS model are considered, and differentiated results compared with previous work are obtained. The research results provide guidelines for software firms in deciding their product releases in the future.

The purpose of this research is to understand how power relations in global value chains (GVCs) shape the upgrading of offshoring service providers (OSPs). More specifically, the chapter addresses two questions: (1) How power asymmetry in GVC shapes the upgrading prospects for OSPs? and (2) How OSPs manage the power asymmetry in GVC and upgrade to a more favorable position?

The context for this study is the software value chain. Drawing upon relational economic geography and GVC literature, we build an analytical framework based on three conceptual building blocks: client power, upgrading, and upgrading practices. Based on the analytical framework and in-depth interviews, we design a case study of one OSP in the Pakistani software industry, referred to as OSP#A.

The findings reveal that GVCs exercise a high level of power on OSPs. This power is exercised through enforcing certain conditions to participate and coordinate in GVCs. However, it is found that OSP#A is not passive recipient of these demands. Instead, it actively manages the power asymmetry through building practices to adapt and collaborate in GVCs and attain relational proximity.

The chapter highlights the significance of upgrading practices and conceptualizing upgrading as a process of improving relational power in GVCs by attaining relational proximity.

In the last years the penetration of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems within small, medium and large organizations increased steadily. Organizations are forced to adapt their systems and perform ERP upgrades in order to react to rapidly changing business environments, technological enhancements and rising pressure of competition. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the critical success factors for such projects.

The paper is based on a literature review and qualitative interviews with CEOs, CIOs, ERP consultants and project managers who recently carried out ERP upgrade projects in their respective organizations.

This paper identifies 14 critical success factors for ERP upgrade projects. Amongst others, effective project management, external support, the composition of the ERP team and the usage of a multiple system landscape play a key role for the success of the ERP upgrade. Furthermore, a comparison to the critical success factors for ERP implementation projects was conducted, and even though there are many similarities between these types of projects, several differences emerged.

ERP upgrade projects have a huge impact on organizations, but their success and antecedents for it are currently under-researched.

This paper aims to describe an effort to provide for a robust and secure software development paradigm intended to support DevSecOps in a naval aviation enterprise (NAE) software support activity (SSA), with said paradigm supporting strong traceability and provability concerning the SSA’s output product, known as an operational flight program (OFP). Through a secure development environment (SDE), each critical software development function performed on said OFP during its development has a corresponding record represented on a blockchain.

An SDE is implemented as a virtual machine or container incorporating software development tools that are modified to support blockchain transactions. Each critical software development function, e.g. editing, compiling, linking, generates a blockchain transaction message with associated information embedded in the output of a said function that, together, can be used to prove integrity and support traceability. An attestation process is used to provide proof that the toolchain containing SDE is not subject to unauthorized modification at the time said critical function is performed.

Blockchain methods are shown to be a viable approach for supporting exhaustive traceability and strong provability of development system integrity for mission-critical software produced by an NAE SSA for NAE embedded systems software.

A blockchain-based authentication approach that could be implemented at the OFP point-of-load would provide for fine-grain authentication of all OFP software components, with each component or module having its own proof-of-integrity (including the integrity of the used development tools) over its entire development history.

Many SSAs have established control procedures for development such as check-out/check-in. This does not prove the SSA output software is secure. For one thing, a build system does not necessarily enforce procedures in a way that is determinable from the output. Furthermore, the SSA toolchain itself could be attacked. The approach described in this paper enforces security policy and embeds information into the output of every development function that can be cross-referenced to blockchain transaction records for provability and traceability that only trusted tools, free from unauthorized modifications, are used in software development. A key original concept of this approach is that it treats assigned developer time as a transferable digital currency.

The use of software is overpowering our modern society. Advancement in technology is directly proportional to an increase in user demand which further leads to an increase in the burden on software firms to develop high-quality and reliable software. To meet the demands, software firms need to upgrade existing versions. The upgrade process of software may lead to additional faults in successive versions of the software. The faults that remain undetected in the previous version are passed on to the new release. As this process is complicated and time-consuming, it is important for firms to allocate resources optimally during the testing phase of software development life cycle (SDLC). Resource allocation task becomes more challenging when the testing is carried out in a dynamic nature.

The model presented in this paper explains the methodology to estimate the testing efforts in a dynamic environment with the assumption that debugging cost corresponding to each release follows learning curve phenomenon. We have used optimal control theoretic approach to find the optimal policies and genetic algorithm to estimate the testing effort. Further, numerical illustration has been given to validate the applicability of the proposed model using a real-life software failure data set.

The paper yields several substantive insights for software managers. The study shows that estimated testing efforts as well as the faults detected for both the releases are closer to the real data set.

We have proposed a dynamic resource allocation model for multirelease of software with the objective to minimize the total testing cost using the flexible software reliability growth model (SRGM).

The Third International Conference on CD‐ROM sponsored by Microsoft Corporation was held in Seattle March 1–3, 1988.

The purpose of the present work is to mathematically model the reliability growth of a multi-version software system that is affected by infected patches.

The work presents a mathematical model that studies the reliability change due to the insertion of an infected patch in multi-version software. Various distribution functions have been considered to highlight the varied aspects of the model. Furthermore, weighted criteria approach has been discussed to facilitate the choice of the model.

The model presented here is able to quantify the effect of an infected patch on multi-version software. The model captures the hike in bug content due to an infected patch.

Multi-version systems have been studied widely, but the role of an infected patch has not been yet explored. The effect of an infected patch has been quantified by modeling the extra bugs generated in the system. This bug count would prove helpful in further studies for optimal resource allocation and testing effort allocation.