Competition Boosts Innovativeness: The Case of CMS Evolution

This paper presents two software evolution models where the intensity of innovation plays a primary role. The first model describes the generation of new releases, irrespective of whether they bring an essential software improvement to its users or not. The other model takes into account the emergence of essential new functionalities in the releases. Both models assume additionally that the innovation leaders follow a different innovation strategy than their competitors. The leaders’ assumption is that the competing teams follow a catch-up strategy without making radical improvements. There emerge quasi-linear econometric models with vector autoregression. These models are exemplified, calibrated and validated based on historical release logs published by three major open-source CMS providers. Then they are applied to predict further system functionality trends until 2025 and beyond. Model comparison makes it possible to find a relation between innovativeness and creativity measurements, where the latter is derived from the proportion of essential innovations in all releases.