GQM strategies®: A comprehensive methodology for aligning business strategies with software measurement

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) ap-proach has proven itself useful in a variety of industrial settings to support quanti-tative 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 meas-urement efforts and allows measurement data to contribute to higher-level deci-sions. 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 measure-ment 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.