RESUMEN

This article targets organizations that develop and support a broad portfolio of software products or applications. The article discusses a metrics framework to assist in managing such a portfolio, with financial and developmental implications. This framework is based on a heuristic grouping of products into three categories—emerging, growth, and stable—and on a set of product characteristics determined by observed trends in market share, functionality, development cost, support cost, quality, customer cost of ownership, and so on. The article focuses mainly on one characteristic, quality (as represented by software defects and customer-reported field problems), and its impact on service costs. The authors analyze actual data for 27 software products to illustrate the basic ideas and highlight some lessons learned, and discuss various business scenarios that managers can use to exploit this framework. This article is part of a special focus section on software metrics.