Software Release Patterns When is it a good time to update a software component?

Abstract Over the past decade the industry 4.0 witnessed a trend towards an increasing number of software components, dependencies towards third party software components, and software component release cycles. Industry 4.0 teams building software products are more frequently impacted by third party software component updates. Due to this dependency, updating a single third party software component can break an entire software product. Reasons include parallel conflicting updates of third party software components, updating to an unstable version, or updating to a major stable version without an impact analysis. The objective of this paper is to reduce the risk of breaking updates by reviewing software release patterns and proposing update scheduling recommendations.