(An) approach to defining value-based software development process

Abstract

In the era of digitization, software has become a vital part in human beings daily life. Currently, companies are doing their best to survive in a fierce competitive market, and their higher management realize that using software can be an important ``weapon`` to defeat their competitors with in the marketplace. But it is not always the case that software can assist companies in achieving their aims. According to a report of Standish Group on software failures for 2009, still only one third of the delivered software can be considered as successful, and the rest failed because they were either not finished on time or finished on time but spending over budget or for some other reasons. According to Barry Boehm, most of the failures occurred due to value-related drawbacks such as ``lack of user input, incomplete or changing requirements, lack of resources, unrealistic expectations, unclear objectives, and unrealistic schedules.`` Value-Based Software Engineering (VBSE) was a new paradigm created by Barry Boehm to overcome such value-related shortcomings in software development. Much research have already done on value-based requirements engineering, value-based design and architecture, value-based testing, and in other activities. However, up until now there is no holistic approach that could help software engineers, project managers to make non value-based software processes value-based ones. Current works on VBSE mainly concern on how to make specific software process activities bring more value. In this thesis, we propose an approach to defining value-based software development processes. The approach will be helpful in converting and tailoring value-neutral processes to value-based ones. The resulting new processes that incorporate VBSE concepts bring more value to the stakeholders. An experiment is conducted to verify the proposed approach. It compares the traditional value-neutral software development process with the value-based processes obtained as...