Retrospect of Taiwan’s software industry and issues of software maintenance and evolution

Due to high demands of software applications world wide, software industry has drawn a great attention from information communication technologies (ICT) industry for the past decade. Taiwan has been known as one of the major hardware procurement center for global ICT companies, mainly on the basis of ODM or OEM. More than 10 products are ranked No. 1 in the world wide ICT market share. However, the development of software industry has performed not as well as hardware industry. Based on the solid foundation and great achievements of hardware manufactures, Taiwan has designed some strategies and programs to enhance and promote its software industry development in last 10 years. This position paper will describe some of our observation and suggestions to Taiwan software industry. Some projects and issues related to software maintenance and evolution in Taiwan will be discussed too.