Dynamics of Software Development, Second Edition

The Customer

Most software business is repeat business. And this ongoing customer-supplier relationship is difficult to manage well. We won’t consider here the simple case in which the customer makes a single purchase from a supplier, whereupon they mutually abandon the relationship. This “single-purchase” simple case isn’t worth our consideration because as long as the core computer technology races ahead, our customers will need periodic updates from their software suppliers. The complexities arising from the “ongoingness” of the customer-supplier relationship are particularly acute in the case of software products.

The primary cause of this abnormal degree of complexity in the customer-supplier relationship is the fact that many of our software ...