Despite the fact that a handover process is just as frequently performed as any development process, little is known about it. Still, it is regarded as one of the lifecycle processes that is not well explored and defined. In this paper, we study the handover process within eighteen companies with the purpose of demarcating its scope within software lifecycle. Our goal is to find out how industry understands handover process and how it places it within software lifecycle. As a result, we have identified seven different scope contexts for the handover process. We have also provided evidence of its wide lifecycle span and its overlap with development, predelivery and postdelivery maintenance processes. / © 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. Qc 20120223

Handing over a software system from development to maintenance is still an under-researched domain. The software community has a hazy insight into its constellation and inherent activities. In this paper, we have evaluated a preliminary version of a taxonomy of handover activities within one Swedish software company. The evaluation is conducted in an in-house handover context only. Despite this, our results provide evidence of its enormous complexity, variability and strong dependency on many other software engineering processes. / © 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.QC 20120223