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 organization'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.  Keywords Along with the growth in society's dependence on software and other forms of information technology (IT), the size and complexity of software systems have also grown. This has only magni- fied the cost, schedule, and quality concerns that have always plagued software development efforts. For decades, software engineering researchers and practitioners have attempted to control and reduce the costs of building software, to produce working software within shorter periods of time, and to increase the quality of the software produced. While great strides have been made in all three areas, the growth of software, along all dimensions (size, complexity, pervasiveness, criticality, etc.), has outpaced our ability to control all the factors related to its development. What has become clear, however, is that the issues related to software cost, schedule, and quality are inextricably linked with larger issues facing the businesses that develop the software. Such businesses come in a variety of flavors. Some are in the business of selling the software they develop to customers, either as custom-built software on contract or shrink-wrapped applications for some segment of the population. Others are in the business of selling some product or service, of which software is a significant component. Still others may only develop software to support their internal IT infrastructure, and do not sell software-related products. Some software organizations are not in business at all, but are non-profit organizations, government entities, or educational institutions. While all these organizational configurations provide quite different challenges to their development projects, the key here is that all software is developed within a larger business context, encompassing larger business goals, strategies, and measures of success. While all businesses employ various strategies to achieve their objectives, these objectives are not always stated explicitly or clearly enough to allow one to check whether or not they are achieved. Further, how these objectives are translated into lower levels of the business and into individual projects is often even less clear. A methodology is needed to bridge the gap between business strategies and their implementation at the project level. To understand the relationships between the business and project level goals, and to verify their achievement, quantitative data is required. This is one reason why quantitative measures are required at high-maturity software organizations. But software improvement strategies, such as CMMI and ITIL, are not directly linked to business value. Such a linkage must be made explicit or the investment in collecting data does not result in the expected benefits, and the contribution of project performance to the achievement of strategic goals remains unclear. This has the practical effect of the software measurement effort losing its support among decision makers in the organization, and thus eventually failing. The popular Goal Question Metric (GQM) approach 1 has served the software industry well for several decades in defining measurement programs. However, it does not provide explicit support for motivating and integrating measurement at various levels of the organization, e.g., project goals, business goals, strategies, and assumptions. On the other hand, approaches such as Balanced Scorecard 2 address mainly business-level goal-setting activities, and do not support the alignment of objectives at different levels of the organization with an integrated methodology. Approaches such as CoBIT 3 are very focused on a particular application field (such as IT gover-! of ! 2 16 nance) and define a very detailed model that fits the application field quite well, but has to be followed strictly in order for the approach to be applied. The gap in current practice is the lack of explicit linkages between different levels of the organization and the flexibility to adapt and tailor the approach to the specific needs and objectives of the organization. To fill this gap, we propose GQM + Strategies ® (registered trademark application pending): an integrated approach that is based on the popular GQM approach and adds the capability to create measurement programs that ensure alignment between goals and strategies at different levels, from the highest strategic levels of the business to the level of individual development projects. The approach is derived from experiences in the software domain, but it is also intended to be applicable in the systems domain. In what follows, we will look at the foundations of the approach by addressing related work and its influence on GQM + Strategies ® . Next, we will illustrate the application of GQM + Strategies ® to an example business goal, summarize its benefits and features, and describe how the resulting model would be used to efficiently implement a business strategy at all levels of the organization.
In addition, it is worthy to mention the GQM+Strategies REF -which is based on the GQM approach-, as an integrated strategy that allows defining and assessing measurement goals at different organization levels, but it does not specify formal process views to conduct the evaluation and improvement lifecycle as we have shown as an integral component of SiQinU. Also, since issued, the GQM model was at different moments enlarged with proposals of processes and methods.
Linking Software Development and Business Strategy Through Measurement
IEEE Computer 43, no. 4 (2010): 57-65
Computer Science