Putting Business Goals in Context for Measurement

Effective software measurement in a business organization requires a deep understanding of the business context, i.e., the business world in which the organization operates. Thus, there is a need for describing the business world and placing business goals into their context, so sensible measurement plans can be defined and enacted. In this paper, based on Jackson’s ideas on domain representation and using concepts from the GQM+Strategies technique, we propose a method to precisely describe the business domain and its characteristics, the business goals, the strategies, their relationships with the software activities carried out to support the strategies, and how strategies are selected. Specifically, we propose a way to describe the business world first, including business and software processes, and then specify the required measurements.