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Linking Software Development and Business Strategy Through Measurement
Victor R. Basili, Jens Heidrich, Mikael Lindvall, Jürgen Münch, Myrna Regardie, Dieter Rombach, Carolyn Seaman, Adam Trendowicz
TL;DR
Organizations need to connect business goals with software efforts, but existing methods leave this linkage insufficiently addressed. The paper presents GQM+Strategies® as a goal-oriented measurement approach for aligning goals and strategies across organizational levels, with transparency, communication, and adaptability as reported benefits.
Problem
Organizations need to align business goals with software development and justify IT efforts, but explicit methods linking organizational strategies to project-level implementation are lacking.
Method
GQM+Strategies® extends goal-oriented measurement by making goals, strategies, assumptions, contexts, and mappings across organizational levels explicit.
Results
The approach provides transparency into measurement motivations and goal relationships, supports communication between business and software segments, and helps organizations identify conflicts and re-evaluate affected model elements when assumptions or context change.
Takeaways & Limitations
GQM+Strategies® gives organizations a flexible way to connect strategic goals with lower-level software and project measurement while adapting goals and strategies to market needs.
Takeaways & Limitations
The paper notes that assumptions are estimated unknowns that can affect interpretation of the data.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
Most of today's products and services are software-based. Organizations that develop software want to maintain and improve their competitiveness by controlling software-related risks. To do this, they need to align their business goals with software development strategies and translate them into quantitative project management. There is also an increasing need to justify cost and resources for software and system development and other IT services by demonstrating their impact on an organisation's higher-level goals. For both, linking business goals and software-related efforts in an organization is necessary. However, this is a challenging task, and there is a lack of methods addressing this gap. The GQM+Strategies approach effectively links goals and strategies on all levels of an organization by means of goal-oriented measurement. The approach is based on rationales for deciding about options when operationalizing goals and for evaluating the success of strategies with respect to goals.
Need for Business Alignment
Software development occurs within broader business contexts, but organizations often lack clear links between business objectives, strategies, and project-level implementation. GQM+Strategies® is proposed to bridge this gap through adaptable, goal-oriented measurement across organizational levels.
- Need for Business Alignment: Software growth in size, complexity, and pervasiveness has outpaced organizations’ ability to control development cost, schedule, quality, and related factors.Researchers and practitioners have improved these areas, but expanding software dimensions continue to create control challenges.
- Need for Business Alignment: Software projects support diverse business contexts, yet their success remains tied to broader organizational goals, strategies, and measures.These contexts include selling software, delivering software-enabled products or services, supporting internal IT, and serving nonprofit, government, or educational missions.
- Need for Business Alignment: Business objectives are not always explicit enough to verify achievement, and their translation into lower-level business activities and projects is often unclear.The paper identifies this lack of translation as a gap between business strategy and project implementation.
- Need for Business Alignment: GQM+Strategies® extends GQM to create measurement programs that align goals and strategies from the highest strategic levels to individual development projects.The approach is derived from software-domain experience and is also intended for systems-domain application.
Background
The paper builds on goal-oriented measurement approaches that connect goals to data and interpretation, while addressing limitations in existing business-to-software alignment methods. Its approach emphasizes explicit mappings among different organizational levels without requiring those levels to share identical goals.
- Background: Software organizations commonly collect too much data, collect inappropriate data, or inadequately analyze collected data, reducing measurement-program cost effectiveness.These problems can also produce disillusionment about metrics among developers and managers.
- Background: GQM defines goals, refines them into data specifications, and interprets resulting measurements in relation to the original goals.Interpretation models provide contextual guidance for understanding metric data.
- Background: Balanced Scorecard links strategic objectives and measures across financial, customer, internal-process, and learning perspectives without prescribing a static measure set.It functions as a framework for strategic measurement and management.
- Background: Existing combinations of Balanced Scorecard, GQM, and PSM recognize organizational-to-lower-level links but do not explicitly support different linked goals at different organizational levels.GQM+Strategies® maps data related to goals across levels so interpretations at one level can contribute to higher-level goals without identical goals at every level.
GQM+Strategies®
GQM+Strategies® links business, software, and project goals through explicit strategies, context, assumptions, and goal-oriented measurement. Its models support evaluation, communication, adaptation, and tracing how changes affect organizational goals.
- Approach: GQM+Strategies® makes business goals, strategies, and lower-level goals explicit across organizational levels.Strategies connect business goals to software, hardware, marketing, and other organizational goals.
- Measurement framework: The approach combines goals and strategies with GQM measurement goals, questions, metrics, data items, and interpretation models.Interpretation models specify how data are combined and how goal or strategy success is determined.
- Example application: The ABC example models increasing profit through more functionality in short releases, while documenting relevant context factors and assumptions.The example organization provides Web-based information services whose revenue depends on customer system access.
- Benefits: Explicit assumptions, relationships, and interpretation models help organizations identify conflicts, assess changes, and re-evaluate affected parts of the model.The approach also supports adapting goals and strategies to market needs and analyzing organizational consequences.
- Benefits: The approach improves transparency of measurement motivations and goals and can support communication between business and software segments.In the ABC example, project personnel can better understand why implementation approaches such as MoSCoW and COCOMO were requested.
Biographies
The authors are researchers and practitioners affiliated primarily with the Fraunhofer institutes and the University of Maryland, with interests spanning software measurement, project management, quality assurance, and process improvement.
- Authors: Victor R. Basili is a University of Maryland professor and chief scientist at the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering.His research interests include measuring, evaluating, and improving software processes and products through empirical studies.
- Authors: Jens Heidrich researches project management, quality assurance, and measurement at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering.He received an MS in computer science from the University of Kaiserslautern.
- Authors: The author group’s stated interests also include agile methods, software process improvement, software architectures, and experience and knowledge management.The biographies describe affiliations with the Fraunhofer Center and Institute for Experimental Software Engineering.
Sidebars
GQM+Strategies® terminology connects organizational goals to measurable GQM goals, strategies, context, assumptions, and interpretation models. Its elements organize how goals are inherited across levels and how strategies are evaluated.
- Strategies are possible approaches for achieving a goal and may be refined into concrete activities.
- Lower-level goals are inherited from higher-level goals as part of the higher-level strategy.
- GQM goals are measurable goals associated with goals at all organizational levels.
- Interpretation models use data to determine whether goals at different levels are achieved, while context factors and assumptions affect interpretation.
- A GQM+Strategies® Element combines a goal, derived strategies and activities, context information, and assumptions explaining their linkage.
- A GQM graph links one measurement goal to questions, metrics, data items, and an interpretation model.