Taxonomy of Software Types. A Review of Information Systems and Software Engineering Literature

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2014 im Fachbereich Informatik - Wirtschaftsinformatik, Note: 1,3, Universität Mannheim, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: The objective of this paper is to provide a literature review on the current state of research on software product types in the information systems and software engineering literature. In particular, this paper provides an overview of currently developed software types by examining existent taxonomies and classification approaches in this field. Additionally, taxonomy development procedures will be analyzed, and it will be investigated whether there exists a well-recognized taxonomy development procedure in information systems and software engineering.

Nowadays, more and more problems in business and in everyday life are solved by software. While our grandparents know almost all the streets they live in by heart, our generation uses navigation software on mobile devices to get from one place to another place that is only a few kilometers away. 20 years ago, nobody could imagine such a digital world we are living in today. Probably nobody would believe that a supercomputer (IBM¿s Watson) would ever beat human beings in the Jeopardy television show.

With considerable improvements and innovations in technology in the recent years, the software industry has seen many changes and has made substantial advancements. New software development techniques, procedures and capabilities have evolved. Moreover, the variety of types of software products has further diversified and application areas of software both in business and in the private sector have immensely expanded. For instance, real-time data processing applications and software for big data analytics have gained high importance to face the trend of big data in today¿s business environment.

The increasing number of software types, however, increases the research efforts of researchers as long as newly developed software types are not well classified. Appropriate taxonomies are important in research and practice since the structurization of objects helps researchers and practitioners understand similarities, differences and relationships within complex fields and consequently facilitates research. Grimshaw (1996) formulated this problem very appropriately: ¿The lack of a commonly agreed taxonomy raises the barriers to entry to the subject of information systems and potentially leads to a waste of energies chasing the same thing by a different name.¿