Measurement and Decision Making

Value-Based Software Engineering requires the capability to measure and analyze value in order to make informed decisions. The difficulty experienced by many organizations in measuring concepts that are even simpler than value suggests that this requirement will be hard to meet. The goal of this chapter is to build an understanding of measurement and decision making and the relationship between them. A multi-view model of measurement is presented as a way to cope with the complexity of measuring concepts such as value. A behavioral decision making model is presented that identifies the points at which measurement products impact the decision making behavior of a manager or software engineer. This model attempts to satisfactorily account for the idiosyncrasies of human behavior, while preserving some elements of the rational model of decision making. The chapter concludes with an application of these models to a case study in which achieving value is a key goal.

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