GQM+Strategies: A Comprehensive Methodology for Aligning Business Strategies with Software Measurement
This addresses the challenge for software organizations in ensuring that measurement data contributes to strategic decisions, though it appears incremental by extending the existing GQM approach.
The paper tackles the problem of aligning software measurement goals with higher-level business strategies in software-intensive organizations, proposing the GQM+Strategies methodology to link these levels and justify measurement efforts.
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(R) measurement approach that builds on the GQM approach to plan and implement software measurement. GQM+Strategies(R) 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 of the entire business. The proposed method is illustrated in the context of an example application of the method.