Niculescu: The Influence of Software Process Maturity and Customer Error Reporting 2726 Management Science 59(12

Please do not cite or distribute without permission from the authors. Software producers are making greater use of customer error reporting toward the end of soft-ware development processes and throughout the maintenance lifetime of their products. We study how software development differences among producers, such as varying process maturity, and software class and functionality differences, such as operating system versus productivity software, affect how these producers coordinate software release timing and pricing to opti-mally harness error reporting contributions from users. In settings where prices are fixed, we characterize informative bounds on a software’s optimal release time. Furthermore, contrary to conventional wisdom, we further demonstrate that under certain market conditions it can be preferable to delay release when either customer error reporting rates increase, software func-tionality decreases, or the size of a pre-release beta testing group increases. When a software producer has limited control over price, we demonstrate that higher process maturity or inter-mediate maturity, low user error detection contribution, and low functionality tend to provide incentives for the producer to adopt a strategy where it releases its product to the market a