the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE2004)

Product portfolio management is crucial to product-oriented software companies ’ long-term success but is mostly overlooked by current software engineering research. This paper presents preliminary results from a multiple case study on the state-of-the-practice and improvement of product portfolio management processes in three small product-oriented software companies. Our findings suggest that implementing portfolio management as explained in the literature is based on assumptions about the product development process that do not hold in the context of small software product businesses. Based on the limitations of existing research this paper presents a number of questions to guide further work. 1