The Role of Improvisation in Off-the-Shelf Software Development of Entrepreneurial Vendors

Improvisation has been discussed to some extent in the innovation and entrepreneurship literature with regard to processes and tasks performed by entrepreneurs when faced with uncertainty, such as in organizational learning in uncertain technology environments, in the decision making process, and in the founding process. The role of improvisation has also been discussed with regard to software organizations arid software development and the various tasks performed by the development heads and teams. Hence, to make this connection between the software development process, improvisation and entrepreneurs, this research reports the observations made in a multiple case study scene of an entrepreneurial vendor of off-the-shelf software. Through these observations, a new form of software development emerged. This form, lead-driven development is based upon improvisation of the software development processes by entrepreneurial vendors who improvise new product features and bug-fixes based on leads they pick up from one marketing meeting or demonstration to the next one. This type of development, although not very beneficial in the long run for the product´s commercial development tailors demo features specifically to potential customers´ needs. Thus, the chances to satisfy potential customers´ needs through the product´s associated benefits and features, improve. We discuss in length how the improvisation is employed and recommend, a software development task path based upon it. We bring figures to demonstrate how lead driven development has been found to be beneficial to vendors. Following the suggested model for software development for entrepreneurial vendors, we introduce a theoretical framework from the Innovation literature and by the use of knowledge gathered from the case studies conducted we explain how vendors may achieve an improved level of software development improvisational skills.