Goal-Driven Software Development Process: Difference between revisions

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'''Goal-Driven Software Development Process''' (GDP<!-- gdp -->) is an [[iterative and incremental development|iterative and incremental]] [[software development]] technique. Although similar to other modern [[process modeling|process models]], GDP is primarily focusing on identifying goals ''before'' setting the requirements and explicitly utilizing the bottom-up design approach.

The following sections are based on the paper ''Goal-Driven Software Development'' <ref name="GDSD">{{cite webbook

| chapter-url = http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1263550.1264132

| titlechapter = Goal-Driven Software Development

| accessdate = 2008-12-30

| last = Schnabel

| first = I.

| coauthors author2= Pizka, M

| title = 2006 30th Annual IEEE/NASA Software Engineering Workshop

| year = 2006

| pages = 59–65

| publisher = SEW. 2006. IEEE Computer Society

| doi = 10.1109/SEW.2006.21

| isbn = 0-7695-2624-1

| s2cid = 2964715

}}</ref> where the GDP concept was introduced.

== Justification ==

The first argument to embrace the GDP principles is the aspect of requirements. When developing a software, the strong concentration on requirements (e.g. typical for the [[waterfall model]]) causes excessive costs and reduced quality of the outcome, mainly due to the following reasons:<ref name="GDSD" />:

* Requirements are usually not identical with business objectives because of the author’s limited knowledge about technical possibilities and their costs – such requirements tend to include unnecessary expensive wishes while excluding technically simple features that would provide substantial benefit.

* Formalization of the supported business process during development usually reveals inconsistencies and gaps within that process which need to be compensated with changes to the process itself or to the role of the software system.

The result of these two effects is usually a large number of change requests during and after development (entailing time and cost overruns), therefore the user involvement is considered to be a critical project success factor .<ref name="CHAOS">The chaos report. Technical report, Standish Group, 1994.</ref>.

Secondly, while established [[Software development process|software processes]] refine requirements down to an implementation, the Goal-driven Development Process recommends trying to find an optimal mapping between business objectives and capabilities of

the technical platform in an ''iterative'' process, equally considering and adjusting business goals and technical aspects to come to an optimal, ''convergent'' solution.

Goal-driven development process allows stakeholders to :<ref name="CASE">{{cite journal

| doi = 10.5381/jot.2006.5.2.c9

| url = http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2006_03/column9/

| title = How to align IT with the Changes using UML and according to BMM

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| first = Birol

| journal = Journal of Object Technology | volume = 5| issue = 2 | date= March–April 2006|pages = 85–102

| doi-access = free

}}</ref>:

* Discover use cases that are tailored to the requirements according to business goals

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As closely related to the [[GQM|Goal-Question-Metric]] paradigm, a '''top-level goal''' is defined as an informal description of what a stakeholder wants to change or improve in his business environment, decomposing itself to more specific '''sub-goals'''. Moreover, a set of questions is linked to every goal, which characterizes the way how software will be tested against defined goals after each [[iterative and incremental development|iteration]].

Being this the key GDP principle, the collaborative identification of goals brings knowledge of users and software developers together. While goal definition is top-down driven, deciding, if a goal is feasible is bottom-up oriented.

=== Top-down and bottom-up convergence ===

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: ''For more information see [[Top-down and bottom-up design]]''.

While the top-down orientation supports a horizontal team organization, bottom-up approaches try to provide generalized components or services, leading to a better user satisfaction.<ref name="TDBU">{{cite web

| url = http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1018436.1021759

| title = A brief top-down and bottom-up philosophy on software evolution

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| last = Pizka

| first = M.

| coauthors author2= Bauer, A

| publisher = IPWSE. 2004. IEEE Computer Society

}}</ref>. The collaborative identification of goals introduced by GDP allows combining top-down with bottom-up aspects (“''top-down thinking and bottom-up acting''” <ref name="GDSD" />) to support [[Artifact (software development)|artifacts]] consistency and allowing vertical team organization.

=== Vertical team organization ===

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=== Minimizing project size ===

According to GDP, another key to success in large projectprojects is to minimize project size in all aspects, i.e. limit the number of goals and software [[Artifact (software development)|artifacts]] like documents, requirement specifications, models, etc. but also to limit the number of staffproject members, to avoid mutual waiting and the size of the code.

Minimizing size leads to an increased maintainability and changeability of the system to business processes as they are the most likely factor to change in the future .<ref name="BPCHANGE">Panas, Löwe, Asmann. Towards the unified recovery architecture for reverse engineering. Proc. of the Intern. Conf. on Software Engineering and Practice SERP’03, volume 1, pages 854–860, Las Vegas, NV, June 2003. CSREA Press.</ref>.

== Activities ==

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Every iteration starts with the identification of business goals and their priorities and ends with a running version of the software system corresponding to the selected goals.

While incremental development of the software system is also done in other [[Software development process|software processes]], the scope of GDP iteration is extended to include a discussion of business objectives after ''each'' iteration as is believed the business objectives themselves mature with the availability of usable implementation .<ref name="GDSD" />.

The core activities are:

# '''Identification and prioritization of goals''' (small groups of at most 5 people consisting of stakeholders and/or business analysts, and programmers)

# '''Vertical distribution of tasks''' (selected goals are assigned to groups of at most 4 programmers)

# '''Implementation and testing''' (implementation-driven tests during implementation, goal-driven tests at the end of each iteration)

These activities can be also divided into six main steps :<ref name="CASE" />:

# '''Group business requirements by goals'''

# '''Formalize goal-driven system behaviors inside processes'''

# '''Monitor advancement in the realization of the goals (optional)'''

# '''Assign responsibilities to participants of the processes'''

# '''Plug behaviors in the goal-driven architectural backbone and play'''

# '''Integrate application constraints of the actors'''

== References ==

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* [http://www.goobiz.com/How_to_align_IT_using_UML_and_according_to_BMM.htm How to align IT to changes on a Goal-Driven Service Oriented Architecture using UML, MDA and BMM]

{{Software Engineeringengineering}}

[[Category:Software development process]]