Supporting Strategic Decision-Making for Selection of Software Assets

Abstract

Abstract. Companies developing software are constantly striving to gain or keep their competitive advantage on the market. To do so, they should balance what to develop themselves and what to get from elsewhere, which may be software components or software services. These strategic decisions need to be aligned with business objectives and the capabilities and constraints of possible options. These sourcing options include: in-house, COTS, open source and outsourcing. The objective of this paper is to present an approach to support decision-makers in selecting appropriate types of origins in a specific case that maximizes the benefits of the selected business strategy. The approach consists of three descriptive models, as well as a decision process and a knowledge repository. The three models are a decision model that comprises three cornerstones (stakeholders, origins and criteria) and is based on a taxonomy for formulating decision models in this context, and two supporting models (property models and context models).

A decision-making process-line for selection of software asset origins and components

“…The solution presented in our previous work is presented as a process [45]. However, based on the validations conducted in the case studies presented here, we concluded that the concept of a common process might not be the best fit to reality.…”

“…The evaluation is aimed at validating the coverage of the activities represented by the checklist. We also noticed during the validation that the decisionmakers neither executed the decision-making activities orderly nor did they follow the proposed order of execution in our previous work [45].…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, no paper has addressed all four asset origins [3]. To address this gap, we proposed a set of different decision-making activities and packaged them in a decision-making process for selecting software asset origins [45]. Three types of descriptive models: decision model, property model and context model, as well as a knowledge repository were used as inputs for formulating the set of decision-making activities and the process.…”

“…Therefore, from now on we refer to the previous solution as a checklist, which here more appropriately is described as a process-line, and not a process. The initial goal of the set of activities captured in our previous solution [45] was to support the selection between the four different types of asset origins (in-house, COTS, OSS and outsourcing), although the solution proposed in [45] was expected to be adaptable also to select between different components of the same type of asset origin. Therefore, in this paper the selection between different components of the same type of asset origin is considered as one of the cases for validating the checklist.…”

Choosing Component Origins for Software Intensive Systems: In-House, COTS, OSS or Outsourcing?—A Case Survey

“…Early attempts have been made and preliminary results are available in that regard (cf. Wohlin et al [39]).…”