Toward Evidence-Based Organizations: Lessons from Embedded Systems, Online Games, and the Internet of Things

More and more software-intensive companies are adopting data-driven development. Across domains, companies increasingly collect and use data to support development and decision-making activities. Case studies investigated how companies in three domains transition toward data-driven development practices in which continuous collection and analysis of data inform R&D and management. The companies in the online-games and Internet-of-Things domains perform more advanced data collection and analysis, but these practices are also rapidly gaining momentum in the companies in the embedded-systems domain. A proposed model details the levels that software-intensive companies typically move through as they evolve from an opinion-based to an evidence-based organization, in which data informs all the company’s processes.