Dieter Rombach - Böcker

Aligning Organizations through Measurement

Aligning an organization’s goals and strategies requires specifying their rationales and connections so that the links are explicit and allow for analytic reasoning about what is successful and where improvement is necessary. This book provides guidance on how to achieve this alignment, how to monitor the success of goals and strategies and use measurement to recognize potential failures, and how to close alignment gaps. It uses the GQM+Strategies approach, which provides concepts and actionable steps for creating the link between goals and strategies across an organization and allows for measurement-based decision-making.After outlining the general motivation for organizational alignment through measurement, the GQM+Strategies approach is described concisely, with a focus on the basic model that is created and the process for creating and using this model. The recommended steps of all six phases of the process are then described in detail with the help of a comprehensive application example. Finally, the industrial challenges addressed by the method and cases of its application in industry are presented, and the relations to other approaches, such as Balanced Scorecard, are described. The book concludes with supplementary material, such as checklists and guidelines, to support the application of the method.This book is aimed at organization leaders, managers, decision makers, and other professionals interested in aligning their organization’s goals and strategies and establishing an efficient strategic measurement program. It is also interesting for academic researchers looking for mechanisms to integrate theirresearch results into organizational environments.

Victor R. Basili, Dieter Rombach, and Kurt Schneider Introduction In 1992, a Dagstuhl seminar was held on “Experimental Software Engineering Issues” (seminar no. 9238). Its goal was to discuss the state of the art of empirical software engineering (ESE) by assessing past accomplishments, raising open questions, and proposing a future research agenda. Since 1992, the topic of ESE has been adopted more widely by academia as an interesting and promising research topic, and in industrial practice as a necessary infrastructure technology for goal-oriented, sustained process improvement. At the same time, the spectrum of methods applied in ESE has broadened. For example, in 1992, the empirical methods applied in software engineering were basically restricted to quantitative studies (mostly controlled experiments), whereas since then, a range of qualitative methods have been introduced, from observational to ethnographical studies. Thus, the field can be said to have moved from experimental to empirical software engineering. We believe that it is now time to again bring together practitioners and researchers to identify both the progress made since 1992 and the most important challenges for the next five to ten years.