Business Partners and their Needs
The research consortium will comprise two industrial partners: Ericsson and Spotify. These two companies have very different characteristics in terms of their product portfolio and their development environment. Each company focuses on different market niches i.e., telecommunication when talking about Ericsson and mainly music streaming when talking about Spotify.
The union of these two companies offers a great and unique opportunity to analyze several aspects of the asset degradation, possibly allowing the identification of patterns associated to the development context or the team set up. Patterns that will be identified through static analysis of code repositories and other assets both at Ericsson and Spotify to capture the technical perspective. The project will provide access to precious, massive amounts of data, with historic information over 20 years of product and project data from Ericsson, and over 5 years from Spotify to analyze. Especially if we consider that Spotify has historical data of the permeation of features and design changes [29], which will allow us to perform deep analysis on the effect that decisions might have on degradation and on the value map. These quantitative analyses of this data will be coupled with interviews and focus groups to also capture the human perspective. Thereby giving a much richer model to the root cause of degradation of a certain type.
Ericsson accounts with a long tradition of research partnership with BTH and has participated in several joint projects, some of them currently funded by the Knowledge Foundation, whereas Spotify has not previously collaborated in research projects together with BTH in this scientific area, which also makes this collaboration attractive to open a strategic collaboration with the company.
Ericsson
Ericsson is a large multinational company, with a large product portfolio in the telecommunications sector. Ericsson’s organizational landscape, with long-life products, large-scale projects which are developed by different teams in geographically-distributed offshore sites makes the management of degradation a key aspect with questions like: How much degradation do we currently have? Where is the tipping point? When/how do we take proactive actions? However, nowadays Ericsson does not have any in-place mechanism to handle their asset value degradation, even mechanisms to manage technical debt at code level.
Therefore, the main goal of Ericsson in this project is to be able to:
- Have an effective way to assess the asset value and its degradation.
- Handle the prioritization of the mitigation efforts, when required.
- Have more accurate revenue calculations and project costs, considering the mitigation efforts.
The main outcome of the project from Ericsson’s perspective is a solution that allows decision makers to include the asset value and degradation as an additional aspect to consider in strategical and operational planning. In this case raising the awareness of how to handle the degradation, an accurate detection of the tipping point, and a clearer picture of the ripple effects and consequences on other assets / modules or systems.
Spotify
Spotify is a relatively young company whose music streaming service is being used by millions of users around the world. The application is available platforms (desktop computers, web, mobile applications or video game consoles). Their software products are developed following a very specific, very agile, change-embracing engineering culture. The embracement of change does however come at the cost of quick decisions taken at operational level, which sometimes can have a negative impact on the lifecycle of the projects. Spotify has its own view and model of asset value and degradation like having frequent “feature toggles” that allow new, immature, or not even finished features to be included in releases. Although these features are not accessible to users, this practice allows Spotify to reduce the degradation early on [29]. However, it is still a challenge for Spotify to evaluate where they are in terms of degradation, which types of degradation are more critical, the potential ripple effects on other artefacts as well as the prioritization of mitigation strategies. Therefore, the main goal for Spotify is to:
- Gain access to tools and techniques to monitor their asset value and its degradation
- Acquire a model that allows the prioritization of preventive actions to mitigate the asset degradation considering customers and organizational value map.
The main outcome of the project from Spotify’s perspective is thereby solutions to monitor and quickly prevent or mitigate asset degradation.
In collaboration with:
