Software products and software projects

With the development of national conditions, domestic software accumulation began to deepen, and some companies with relatively high technical capabilities gradually found patterns in their own projects, forming some software products. For example, Kingdee's ERP and our products. This is also a benign manifestation of the software industry. However, the thinking of software products has not changed, leading to the gradual death of many companies.

Difference

Many companies do not understand the differences between software products and software projects. I think the differences mainly exist in the following aspects:

(1) Development Mode

Software products and software projects have different development modes.

Software projects are often relatively independent in the development and management process. This independence is mainly reflected in two aspects: Code independence and document independence. Each software project has its own code project, and each engineering function code has little relevance. Software Project development focuses on directly solving customer needs, and there is no strong technical accumulation logic. A complete software project usually requires a lot of development work. The project manager needs to do a lot of work, mainly to control the progress of a project.

The software product development model is complex. Normally, a product manager has several project managers, and each project manager is responsible for the development of some local projects. During development, it is possible that all projects use one function kernel. The source code generated by each project manager in the local development of the project must be centrally uploaded to the product kernel for an update.

(2) Staffing

There are clear differences between product staffing and project staffing. During project development, a professional talent usually brings a group of technical talents. However, product R & D should be carried by multiple professional talents with a small number of technical talents.

(3) Demand differences

Projects and products have completely different requirements systems. Project requirements mainly come from user requirements. The functional requirements of each project are characteristic and the reusability is not high. Product requirements mainly come from project requirements, market requirements, and industry standards. Product requirements are generally broad and comprehensive. The product demand survey is also completely different from the project model. Product demand research and demand research is not the core model, just like when you buy a toothbrush product, instead of telling the toothbrush what to do, you choose the product first. Then, make some modifications to the localization requirements of the product. However, the development of a project varies greatly, and the project development usually starts from scratch to comprehensively investigate the demand. A project must have a complete requirement survey, database design, outline design, and detailed design.

(4) test differences

Product Management is different from project management, and products rely heavily on software testing. Product Management is a continuous development upgrade. Products generally focus on regression testing and performance testing, and win the market by software quality.

Product Branch

There is another major relationship between products and projects. Projects made by products can easily become branches of software products. A project product is an ecosystem, but there are many small systems in it. Some systems have their own characteristics, which may be incompatible with the original products. In this case, there are many product branches. As the number of projects increases, our localization projects gradually increase, and more demands begin to impact our product development. However, many companies die in product branch management. More and more branches need to invest more and more project management costs, resulting in product control failures. Modifying one project may lead to other project problems.