Managing and assessing the risk of component upgrades

This paper describes the experience, carried out by Ericsson Telecomunicazioni S.p.A (Italy), in managing the migration of their legacy products towards a product line approach and, specifically, how the update of third-party software products is handled in such product lines. The paper describes the Ericsson application scenario in the development and evolution of network management products. Then, it provides an overview of how the company adopts (i) an internal toolkit to manage third party software products, with the aim of determining the impact of their updates upon variants of the network management system, and (ii) a risk management framework, which helps the developer to decide whether and when update third-party products.