Martin Kowalczyk – författare

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.

The concept of processes is at the heart of software and systems engineering. Software process models integrate software engineering methods and techniques and are the basis for managing large-scale software and IT projects. High product quality routinely results from high process quality.

Software process management deals with getting and maintaining control over processes and their evolution. Becoming acquainted with existing software process models is not enough, though. It is important to understand how to select, define, manage, deploy, evaluate, and systematically evolve software process models so that they suitably address the problems, applications, and environments to which they are applied. Providing basic knowledge for these important tasks is the main goal of this textbook.

Münch and his co-authors aim at providing knowledge that enables readers to develop useful process models that are suitable for their own purposes. They start with the basic concepts. Subsequently, existing representative process models are introduced, followed by a description of how to create individual models and the necessary means for doing so (i.e., notations and tools). Lastly, different possible usage scenarios for process management are highlighted (e.g. process improvement and software process simulation).

Their book is aimed at students and researchers working on software project management, software quality assurance, and software measurement; and at practitioners who are interested in process definition and management for developing, maintaining, and operating software-intensive systems and services.