Ross Jeffery When, as a result of pressure from the CEO, the Chief Information Officer poses the question "Just what is this information system worth to the organization?" the IT staff members are typically at a loss. "That's a difficult question," they might say; or "well it really depends" is another answer. Clearly, neither of these is very satisfactory and yet both are correct. The IT community has struggled with qu- tions concerning the value of an organization's investment in software and ha- ware ever since it became a significant item in organizational budgets. And like all questions concerning value, the first step is the precise determination of the object being assessed and the second step is the identification of the entity to which the value is beneficial. In software engineering both of these can be difficult. The p- cise determination of the object can be complex. If it is an entire information s- tem in an organizational context that is the object of interest, then boundary defi- tion becomes an issue. Is the hardware and middleware to be included? Can the application exist without any other applications? If however the object of interest is, say, a software engineering activity such as testing within a particular project, then the boundary definition becomes a little easier. But the measure of benefit may become a little harder.
About the Author: Dr. Stefan Biffl is an associate professor of software engineering at the Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology. He received his MS and PhD in computer science from the Vienna University of Technology and his MS in social and economic sciences from the University of Vienna. He is founder of the Quality Software Engineering research group (QSE) at the Vienna University of Technology. His research interests include project and quality management in software engineering, software inspection, decision support for software engineering processes, and collaboration among project stakeholders. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE.
Dr. Aybüke Aurum is a senior lecturer at the School of Information Systems, Technology and Management, University of New South Wales. She received her BSc and MSc in geological engineering, and MEngSc and PhD in computer science. She is the founder and group leader of the Requirements Engineering Research Group (ReqEng) at the University of New South Wales. She also works as a visiting researcher in National ICT, Australia (NICTA). She is chief editor of "Managing Software Engineering Knowledge" published by Springer in 2003. Her research interests include Management of Software Development Process, Software Inspection, Requirements Engineering, Decision Making and Knowledge Management.
Dr. Paul Grünbacher Associate Professor at Johannes Kepler University Linz and a research associate at the Center for Software Engineering (University of Southern California, Los Angeles). He studied Business Informatics and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Linz. Paul's research focuses on applying collaborative methods and tools to support and automate complex software and system engineering activities such as requirements elicitation and negotiation or software inspections. He is a member of ACM, ACM SIGSOFT, and IEEE. He is General Chair of ASE 2004, the 19th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering.
Barry Boehm is known for four main contributions to software engineering. He was the first to identify software as the primary expense of future computer systems, he developed COCOMO, the spiral model, and pedegogy. Boehm worked at RAND, TRW, Inc, DARPA, and is currently TRW Professor of Software Engineering, Computer Science Department, and Director, USC Center for Software Engineering. Recent awards include the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence (1992), the ASQC Lifetime Achievement Award (1994), and the ACM Distinguished Research Award in Software Engineering (1997). He is an AIAA Fellow, an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
