Alignment of Software Development Life Cycle and Product Life Cycle (Lesson Learned from BBM Fall Down)

Abstract

Blackberry Messenger (BBM) has already announced its shutdown on May 31, 2019. With their massive growth in 2014, BBM slowly decreased the number of users due to their competitor’s growth, such as WhatsApp and Telegram. In the marketing life cycle, when a product already reaches its maturity level, it will enter a decline gate, which means that if a product wants longer existence in the market, it should prevent that decline level, or it will be gone just like BBM. While the product life cycle is related to marketing strategy (in this case BBM is a software product), the software development life cycle (SDLC) is related to information system design and analysis. Thus, this research tries to align both of life cycle and find out which step or level that should be anticipated by the board of director or project manager in software development. The result of this research finally declared that the mature stage should be aligned with the test and operation stage. It also stated that there are some suggestions on avoiding the decline stage, such as implementing change management, take customers’ suggestions and critics seriously for future development and execute strategy into action immediately. Thus, it can delay or even avoid software products entering the decline stage just like the lesson learned from BBM fall down.
 Keywords: product life cycle, software development life cycle, mature stage, BBM