Organizations should establish business goals and check for their achievement in a systematic and disciplined way. In order to know if a business goal is achieved, it should be necessary to consider information need goals that also can require satisfying measurement and evaluation goals at operational level. Furthermore, if measurement and evaluation goals are not aligned with top-level business goals such as tactical or strategic level goals, the organization could waste its effort and resources. Usually, the different goals established in an organization are operationalized through projects. For a given project, strategies should be used in order to help in the goal achievement. A strategy defines a set of activities and methods to be followed for a specific goal purpose. Ultimately, to engineering all these issues in a systematic way, organizations should adopt a holistic evaluation approach supported by a set of integrated strategies. By means of a systematic literature review as research method, we have observed that very few approaches support integrated strategies and multilevel goals. To bridge this gap, we have developed a holistic quality multilevel and multipurpose evaluation approach that ties together multilevel goals, projects and integrated strategies. As contributions, this paper discusses an enhanced conceptual base (specified by ontologies) for linking business and information need goal concepts with project, strategy and nonfunctional requirements concepts. Then, it defines the step by step of our holistic quality evaluation approach, by listing the necessary activities to establish goals and projects at different organizational levels. Lastly, it specifies and illustrates evaluation scenarios for business/information need goal purposes such as understanding, improving, monitoring and controlling, comparing and selecting entities, which are supported by strategies and strategy patterns.

For any software company that frequently performs quality assurance activities devoted to measurement, evaluation (ME) and change/improvement (MEC) projects, ME and MEC strategies can be valuable organizational assets. In this paper, we analyze the improvement of a ME strategy, which can be considered an organizational resource to be applied to quality assurance activities. This resource is called the GOCAME (Goal-Oriented Context-Aware Measurement and Evaluation) strategy. AME/MEC strategy embraces the next three integrated capabilities: 1) the ME/MEC domain conceptual base and framework; 2) the process perspective specifications; and, 3) the method specifications. The improvement of GOCAME was performed instantiating two strategy patterns. A strategy pattern is a reusable solution to recurrent problems in ME/MEC projects. For an improvement goal, the selected MEC strategy pattern allows instantiating in a project a set of tailored activities and methods for measurement, evaluation, analysis and change. Particularly, we instantiate the GoME_1QV (Goal-oriented Measurement and Evaluation for One Quality View) strategy pattern to understand the GOCAME current quality state and compare it with the so-called GQM + Strategies. First, this evaluation and analysis allows us to know the GOCAME strengths and weaknesses with regard to the quality of the three capabilities. Second, we instantiate the GoMEC_1QV (Goal-oriented Measurement, Evaluation and Change for One Quality View) strategy pattern to improve the GOCAME current state, producing as result a new version of the GOCAME strategy.

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