BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN BUSINESS STRATEGY AND SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Victor Robert Basili, Jens Heidrich, Mikael Lindvall, Jürgen Münch, Myrna Regardie, H. Dieter Rombach, Carolyn Budinger Seaman, Adam Trendowicz · 2007
In software-intensive organizations, an organizational management system will not guarantee organizational success unless the business strategy can be translated into a set of operational software goals. The Goal Question Metric (GQM) approach has proven itself useful in a variety of industrial settings to support quantitative software project management. However, it does not address linking software measurement goals to higher-level goals of the organization in which the software is being developed. This linkage is important, as it helps to justify software measurement efforts and allows measurement data to contribute to higher-level decisions. In this paper, we propose a GQM+Strategies® measurement approach that builds on the GQM approach to plan and implement software measurement. GQM+Strategies® provides mechanisms for explicitly linking software measurement goals to higher-level goals for the software organization, and further to goals and strategies at the level o f the entire business. An example application of the proposed method is illustrated in the context of an example measurement initiative.