Decision Guidance on Software Feature Selection to Maximize the Benefit to Organizational Processes

摘要

Many software development projects fail because they do not deliver sufficient business benefit to justify the investment. Existing approaches to estimating business benefit of software adopt unrealistic assumptions which produce imprecise results. This paper focuses on removing this limitation for software projects that automate business workflow processes. For this class of projects, the paper proposes a new approach and a decision-guidance framework to select and schedule software features over a sequence of software releases as to maximize the net present value of the combined cash flow of software development as well as the improved organizational business workflow. The uniqueness of the proposed approach is in precise modelling of the business workflow and the savings achieved by deploying new software functionality.