Strategies for Managing Computer Software Upgrades

This book claims that it will “aid IT managers in selecting strategies for managing issues associated with the implementation of software upgrades”. Unfortunately, it seems to miss its target audience and instead comes across as something that may be of more interest to academics and students. This is partly because of the chosen format: the book is really a collection of previously published papers from a variety of Idea Group journals with a couple of purpose written chapters.

The book is split into three parts. The first contains papers on “the software upgrade phenomenon”, followed by a section on “current trends in software upgrades” and the last part is entitled “new strategies and solutions”. There is also an introduction by Dr Shaw, an introductory chapter for each part, a section giving a biography of all the authors of the papers and an index. Each paper is, as one would expect from a journal article, a self‐contained work, each with its own abstract, references and style.

The eclectic mix of styles makes this book difficult to read in one go. When academics and researchers “read” technical papers in journals they often have a tendency to flick through the titles and abstracts, glance over the tables and figures of potentially interesting articles and then only deeply read the articles that really grab them. Due to the style of the book closely resembling a journal itself, I kept finding myself doing the same thing with this book and had to continually force myself into reading all the chapters for this review. In fact “dipping in” might be the best way to use this book.

The papers also cover over ten years of research and in places contradict one another. For example, one paper champions the role of total quality management (TQM) in software development. This is followed by an analysis of IT factors in the introduction to the next part that tells us that technical quality is not necessarily an important criterion.

The target audience of busy IT managers are likely to want to have a consistent set of techniques and tips clearly presented to them. For these readers, discerning valuable strategies for software upgrade management from the collected papers in this book may well be an uphill struggle. There is definitely useful information in the papers in the book, but the academic presentation and lack of consistency make extracting this in a useful way difficult. To capture this market the compiler should have at the very least provided a clear summary of the strategies he felt were most beneficial, although the academic paper format is not really suited at all to this group of readers.

This book cannot really be recommended to the IT managers at whom it claims to be aimed for the reasons of presentation and style listed above. It might be more suitable for academics wishing to get an overview of the field, although even then it is rather expensive.