The use of the Internet in an academic environment to commercially supply and support software products.

Abstract

This paper explores the use of the Internet to supply and support software products within a quality management system. The Software Engineering Applications Laboratory (SEAL) at the University of the Witwatersrand is in the process of developing various software products that will be commercially distributed in the near future. The SEAL has chosen to the Internet to supply and support these products. The system to be developed for this task has been named the Internet System for the Supply and Support of Software (IS). Issues that have influenced the design of the IS have been the service processes within a quality management system, the control of the supply and licensing of the supplied products and the transaction processing of the on-line sales. The SEAL is committed to developing and supplying software within a quality management system. Consequently an investigation was undertaken into the quality characteristics and requirements based on the ISO 9001 standard for quality assurance and the ISO\JEC JTCI \SC7 software engineering standards. These quality concerns are being incorporated into the SEAL 's quality management system and the development process for SEAL products. To control the supply and licensing of the supplied products, various issues such as unlock keys, Internet based registration, controlled access and hardware control have been investigated. The advantages and disadvantages of each have been investigated. To process the on-line transactions the IS is being developed to be compliant with recently released 'Secure Electronic Transactions ' (SET) standard.