An infrastructure for empirically-based software engineering technology selection

In today's software development organizations, methods and tools are employed that frequently lack sufficient evidence regarding their suitability, limits, qualities, costs, and associated risks. The need to select the best-suited method, technique or tool in a given business context is becoming more and more important. From a business perspective the trade-off between time-to-market, quality, and cost is a crucial factor for the decision process. While new findings from research await their transfer into industrial practice, systematic assessment, selection and infusion of these findings with regard to business objectives and context is lacking. This paper presents ongoing research towards the development of a decision support system that aims at improving software engineering technology selection by software managers with regard to business goals. The focus of this paper is on presenting the problems at hand, the idea for a comprehensive decision support, and discussing how the resulting framework could be enacted.