The CRUSOE Framework: A Holistic Approach to Analysing Prerequisites for Continuous Software Engineering

Continuous software engineering (CSE) is used for customer experiments and repetitive integrated processes within and between business planning and software development. First, this paper defines a new framework, called CRUSOE, for analysing CSE prerequisites. The framework allows for a more precise analysis of the interrelations and estimation of the changes that are prerequisites for moving from traditional product development to CSE. CRUSOE addresses prerequisites associated with and interdependencies among (1) the strategy, (2) architecture and (3) organisation. Second, this paper describes a case study conducted as part of a smartphone platform project to investigate the CSE prerequisites for product-focused software development. The results are synthesised together with recent related studies using the CRUSOE framework. The findings confirm challenges in moving towards CSE in embedded system development. Moreover, context-specific prerequisites should be considered, while it is still unclear as to how CSE can be systematically applied to the non-website development context.