Software Product Engineering – A Long Time Practitioner’s Perspective

Many of us have had a first hand experience of building software products. We all have been through a typical life cycle in product development.

In the process, as engineers or leads or architects, we have certainly encountered situations where a business problem had to be put ahead of the technology choices at each stage of the product life cycle. If the product being built is of an enterprise scale, then such situations are quite often.

With the advent of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), the mindset with which we engineers approached product building, has to undergo a broader shift. What are the challenges that SaaS is bringing in? With SaaS gaining traction, what kind of re-alignment is needed from us engineers? What is it that we as engineers can do, to help products succeed "as a service" ?

How do we decide what is most important at each stage of a product’s maturity cycle? What is a correct decision in one stage of the life cycle becomes a wrong decision in another. These are very context dependent questions, and our good friend Google cannot be of much help here.

On these interesting questions, let us hear from Mr. Suresh Marur, VP of Engineering at Actiance Inc., who has been through several product maturity cycles during his 27 year long career in the enterprise software product development industry.