A Process Model and Typology for Software Product Updaters

Abstract

Product software is constantly evolving through extensions, maintenance, changing requirements, changes in configuration settings, and changing licensing information. Managing evolution of released and deployed product software is a complex and often underestimated problem that has been the cause of many difficulties for both software vendors and customers. This paper presents a process model and typology to characterize techniques that support product software update methods. Also, this paper assesses and surveys a variety of existing techniques against the characterization framework and lists unsolved problems related to software product updaters.