Our Spruce tool explained

Software:

Software is abstract, complex, hard to measure and even more difficult to value.

For those who develop, buy or invest in software products and businesses, understanding all aspects of software and their interrelation is essential for business success.

Today, software impacts every business. Whether you are looking to develop a piece of software to enhance your enterprise or are investing in a software product or company, software presents a management challenge. Software projects are often late, and software can be poor quality or difficult to use resulting in customer dissatisfaction or increased cost.

Some of the challenges faced by companies include …

• Lack of understanding of the software business case or its viability
• Not realizing the total cost of ownership
• Not having the ability to measure the quality level of the software
• Poor understanding the legal or compliance issues
• Selection of the right technology to ensure future enhancements
• Not knowing what are the intellectual property assets that should be protected and what are the IP associated risks
• Ensuring that the user experience is competitive
• Poor software security
• No appreciation of the various ethical issues associated with software

Spruce:

To deal with the complexity and abstract nature of software, a model is needed to enable a holistic view of the software product or service in question that supports evaluation of the current state as well as actions to improve.

It is not as simple as assessing whether the software product or service 'does what it says on the tin'.

Success with any software product or service means adopting a holistic approach and appreciating that a variety of issues have to be addressed.

It is for this very reason that my company designed and developed our Spruce Software Product or Service Assessment tool

Background:

Work actually started on Spruce some time ago when a group of software engineers, software managers, software quality experts, software sourcing & procurement professionals plus some non-software folks drawn from different industry sectors held a series of workshops to explore this topic.

Spruce consists of a comprehensive structured assessment running on a secure GDPR compliant online platform.

Spruce examines a software product or service across multiple dimensions

Delving deeper into Spruce:

What are these dimensions?

• the nature of the software product or service to be assessed
• the business model
• the technology
• the software quality
• the user interface and user experience
• the legal and commercial arrangements
• the software management
• the intellectual property
• the software security
• various ethical issues

About the type of software product or service to be assessed

Computer software (or just software) is a general term primarily used for digitally stored data such as computer programs and other kinds of information read and written by computers. Today, this includes data that has not traditionally been associated with computers, such as film, tapes and records.

Software is a lot more than just the Microsoft applications which run on a desktop PC or the enterprise applications which run on servers. Software includes such diverse things as video games, web sites, mobile phone ring-tones & screen savers, smart phone applications, Google Earth, Wikipedia, and Wii games.

This section of Spruce examines the nature of the software product or service to be assessed.

About the business model

The purpose for assessing the business model is to understand the viability of the business case for the software product, service or company including the market opportunity, competitive situation, and price estimation. This will inform investment decisions and the valuation of the product.

About the technology

The purpose for assessing the technology is to understand what technology is used, how innovative or competitive it is, how well structured the software is for deployment, maintenance and future development.

About the software quality

The purpose of assessing software quality is to determine the quality of deliverable software, the capability and maturity of processes for development and to determine the objective measures for assessing the likely performance of the product in use.

About the user interface & user experience (UI & UX)

The UI / UX assessment evaluates the objective measures of UI / UX performance and the subjective user experience. The purpose is to determine the competitiveness and end-user appeal of the software product or service.

About the legal & commercial arrangements

The purpose of this dimension of assessment is to ensure that all necessary legal contracts, licenses and agreements are in place with all parties involved with the software product or service.

About the software management

The purpose of assessing the software management processes and performance is to determine the capability and maturity, and to identify possible improvement actions.

About the intellectual property (IP)

The assessment of intellectual property is intended to determine the IP assets (both registered and un-registered) and IP related risks associated with the product or business. It also explores any specific IP models embraced.

About the software security

What does software security mean and how is it being addressed? Software security includes the protection against malicious attack and other hacker risks so that the software continues to function correctly under such potential risks. Security is necessary to provide integrity, authentication and availability.

About the ethical issues

Business ethics is the study of appropriate business policies and practices regarding potentially controversial subjects including corporate governance, insider trading, bribery, discrimination, corporate social responsibility, and fiduciary responsibilities.

One of the greatest challenges for many software product or service business owner is navigating such ethical issues. Whereas some ethical issues in business are covered by laws, the requirements around others are more murky. 

This section of the assessment explores various ethical issues to ensure that everything is ok, and that nothing here is amiss.

Use cases:

• Helping communication inside an organization between a software team and senior management particularly if senior management are not ex software engineers
• Helping sourcing or procurement folks tasked with licensing in or buying in software products or services, particularly if such sourcing or procurement folks have historically being more familiar with buying physical goods (e.g. widgets)
• Helping Legal or IP Advisors better understand clients who are designing and developing software products or services
• Helping start-up software companies better communicate with potential investors and explaining themselves and their product or service to such investors
• Helping larger companies acquiring smaller companies that are software product or service companies, and really wanting to understand what they are acquiring
• Helping Insurance Providers better understand clients who are software product or service companies
• Helping software product or services teams ensure that they themselves are taking a holistic approach.

Output:

One sample output from Spruce is shown here below just for reference. This shows the status of the key dimensions of the software product or service being assessed.

Many other outputs may be generated from the Spruce tool.

This output below delves into one of the key dimensions, namely the UI/UX dimension and breaks that dimension down further.

Summary:

Success with any software project or software business means adopting a holistic approach to software management and appreciating that a variety of issues need to be addressed.

Copyright notice !

This material above is protected by copyright.

Any reproduction of part or all of the contents in any form is prohibited, except with my express written permission.

You may not, except with my express written permission, distribute or commercially exploit the content.

Nor may you transmit it or store it in any other website or other form of electronic retrieval system, except with my express written permission.

Failure to comply with the terms of this warning may expose you to legal action for copyright infringement

Donal O'Connell is the Managing Director of Chawton Innovation Services Ltd.

More details on the Spruce Software Product or Service Assessment Tool are available on request.