SOFTWARE PROJECTS FINANCE SUPPORT: Preliminary talks between software project managers and potential investors

This paper is about software projects finance support. In this work we consider software projects as risky investments. In fact we are presenting a general scheme proposal to be used, by software engineers and software project managers, along preliminary discussions with software projects potential investors. Before facing any real world software project, a frequent software project manager first step is obtaining project's finance support [1]. Important software projects are, mostly, risky projects. Investors oriented to risky investments have their own rules. We remark that the relevant aspect in this paper is our set of suggestions about language, models and techniques to be used by software engineers and software project managers during first talks with potential project finance supporters. In this paper we present "an extended language" [1] that investors understand and use as a standard communication tool. As a result of our experience, both in real world software project management and in academia [2] [3] [4], we are complementing a general scheme proposal to study, at project preliminary stages, software project finance support feasibility [1]. That general scheme is based on the investors way of thinking during their decision making process. Constructing an optimum investment portfolio is the key point for investors. Offering a portfolio of projects instead an isolated project is the key paper suggestion for software engineers. Constructing an optimum portfolio is presented, in this paper, as a shared task between software engineers, software project managers and potential investors.