| Term | Definition |
| Business Case | An assessment of the costs and benefits associated with a proposed initiative. |
| Company Board | The enitity of a company which is responsible for the definition and communication of strategy, vision and mission to the rest of the company. Also, it has the managerial supervision of the different departments, including product management. |
| Functional Requirement | A statement that identifies what a product or process must accomplish to produce required behavior and/or results. |
| Innovation Management | The discipline of managing processes in innovation. It can be used to develop both product and organizational innovation. Without proper processes, it is not possible for R&D to be efficient; innovation management includes a set of tools that allow managers and engineers to cooperate with a common understanding of goals and processes. The focus of innovation management is to allow the organization to response to external or internal opportunity, and use its creative efforts to introduce new ideas, processes or products. |
| Non-functional Requirement | Non-functional requirements are the ones that act to constrain the product. Non-functional requirements are sometimes known as constraints or quality requirements. |
| Product | A product is a combination of goods and services, which a supplier/development organization combines in support of its commercial interests to transfer defined rights to a customer. |
| Product Lifecycle | The product life cycle describes a product from its conception to its discontinuance and market withdrawal. |
| Product Lifecycle Management | Product lifecycle management is a comprehensive approach for product-related information and knowledge management within an enterprise, including planning and controlling of processes that are required for managing data, documents and enterprise resources throughout the entire product lifecycle. |
| Product Roadmap | A document that provides a layout of the product releases to come over a time frame of three to five years. The creation of a roadmap is influenced by the product strategy designed for this product. |
| Product Strategy | Consistent documentation containing the following items and their evolution during the strategic time span of up to 5 years: • Product vision • Product definition • Target market, potential segments • Delivery model • Product positioning • Sourcing • Business plan • Roadmap |
| Product-Technology Roadmap | A product-technology roadmap provides an overview of the relationship between product releases (product evolvement) and successive technology generations. |
| Release Definition | The selection of requirements to be implemented in the next product increment. |
| Requirements Management | The activities, that control requirements development, including requirements change control, requirements attributes definition, and requirements traceability. |
| Requirements Prioritization | Requirements prioritization is defined as the activity during which the most important requirements for the system are discovered. As priorities change over time this activity is often targeted for the next release of the product. |
| Software Product Family | A group of software products which for marketing reasons are marketed as belonging together under a common family name. |
| Software Product Lines | A set of software-intensive systems that share a common, managed set of features satisfying the specific needs of a particular market segment or mission, and that are developed from a common set of core assets in a prescribed way. |
| Software Release Management | Software release management is the process through which software is made available to, and obtained by, its users. |
| Software Requirement | A software requirement is a property which must be exhibited by a software developed or adapted to solve some problem in the real world. |
| Support | Support stands for the helpdesk to answer questions (1st line support) and for small defect repair unit (2nd line support). Large defect repair is usually performed by Development (3rd line support). |
| Target Market | A target market or target audience is the market segment which a particular product is marketed to. It is often defined by age, gender and/or socio-economic grouping. Market Targeting is the process in which intended actual markets are defined, analyzed and evaluated just before the final decision to enter is made. |
| Trademark | A distinctive sign, which identifies certain goods or services as those produced or provided by a specific person or enterprise. |
Terms of Use
The glossary may be used as a basis for seminars, provided that the copyright is acknowledged and included in the seminar materials. Use of the glossary in advertising is not permitted without the prior written permission of the ISPMA.
The glossary may be used as a basis for articles, books or other derived publications, provided the copyright is acknowledged and ISPMA cited as the source for such publications.
The glossary is subject to change without previous notice.
All rights reserved. Making digital or hard copies for personal and educational use is permitted. Any other reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, is not permitted witout the prior written permission of the ISPMA.
Sources
The glossary was developed and evolves with a consensus-oriented process. Some terms are based on definitions from the following references.
Clements, P., Northrop, L. (2001): Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns. Addison-Wesley Professional.
Haines, S. (2009): The Product Manager’s Desk Reference. McGraw-Hill.
van der Hoek, A. (1997): “Software Release Management”, 6th European Software Engineering Conference and 5th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Heidelberg, Germany.
IEEE (2005): “IEEE Standard for Application and Management of the Systems Engineering Process”, IEEE 1220-2005.
IIBA (2009): “A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge”, Version 2.0.
SWEBOK (2004): Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge. IEEE.
Sommerville, I. (1996): Software Engineering. Addison-Wesley.
Tourwe, T., Codenie, W., Boucart, N., Blagojevic, V. (2009): “Demystifying Release Definition: from Requirements Prioritization to Collaborative Value Quantification”, Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (RefsQ 2009), Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
World Intellectual Property Organization (2004). WIPO Intellectual Property Handbook: Policy, Law and Use. WIPO Publication No.489.
B. Regnell and S. Brinkkemper (2005): “Market-Driven Requirements Engineering for Software Products”, Engineering and Managing Software Requirements, A. Aurum and C. Wohlin (eds.), Berlin, Germany, Springer Verlag, pp 287-308
