Enhancing the System Development Process Performance: a Value-Based Approach

When planning or controlling the system development process, a project leader needs to make decisions which take into account a number of aspects, including: availability of assets and competences, previously enacted processes in the organization, certifications the system is required to obtain, standards to comply with, interactions among process activities, contextual factors and constraints, and allocated budget and schedule. In this paper we propose a value-based approach for supporting decision making. The aim is to provide supportive information for decisions related to the system verification process. This would in turn enhance the performance of system development process by supporting the decision making process for complex systems. We report both academic and industrial empirical evaluations, which demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposal, and thus prompt us to refine and extend our approach to sub-processes other than verification.