Improving the customer configuration update process by explicitly managing software knowledge

The implementation and continuous support of a software product at a customer with evolving requirements is a complex task for a product software vendor. There are many customers for the vendor to serve, all of whom might require their own version or variant of the application. Furthermore, the software application itself will consist of many (software) components that depend on each other to function correctly. On top of that, these components will evolve over time to meet the changing needs of customers. To alleviate this problem we propose to alleviate the software release and deployment effort and reduce risks associated with it. This will be achieved by explicitly managing typical knowledge about the software product, such as configuration and dependency information, thereby allowing software vendors to improve the customer configuration updating process. The proposed solution of knowledge management at both the customer and vendor site, is validated through industrial case studies.