Value-Based Software Engineering (VBSE) is a discipline that considers economic aspects within the whole software development life cycle. It can be defined as a software development paradigm in which required business value considerations are importantly and equally engineered in to software processes, best practices, activities and tasks, management and technology decisions, tools and techniques used through the software life cycle.
Along with its emergence, different challenges have arise such as development of new models, tools,techniques and methodologies, or even extending existing ones, in order to enable planning, analysing, modeling, implementing, testing and tracking various value concerns through out all software phases. It also aimed at allowing different stakeholders (including business and technical managers, developers, business analysts and users) measuring various value concerns and performing trade-off analysis. Furthermore,such models help business managers to determine at any stage of software development life cycle which decision is financially more feasible and comprehensive than others. For example, what are the system functionalities and/or qualities that have major impact on there venue?
A comprehensive agenda as a foundation platform for the VBSE discipline has been suggested. It discusses related concepts and terminologies as well as essential software engineering phases in which business value should be considered. This includes requirement engineering, architecture and design, development, verification and validation, planning and control, risk management, quality management,and people management. It further proposes a foundation framework paradigm which consists of seven key elements: Benefits Realization Analysis, Stakeholder Value Proposition Elicitation and Reconciliation, Business Case Analysis, Continuous risk and Opportunity Management, Concurrent System and Software Engineering, Value-Based Monitoring and Control and Change as Opportunity.
Another VBSE approach has focused on the modeling and simulation of economic value to show influences between various aspects including specifications, investment cost, schedule, software quality practices,market size, pricing and revenue generation. It allows trade-offs between different product strategies, software process, marketing practices and pricing schemes.[2] The primary aim of these techniques not only to enhance business decision making regarding attained value but also to perform business case analysis and track financial measures over the time.
Source: Wikipedia