Bridging EE and SE: The Goals Approach

Organizations still struggle to maintain and develop their software patrimony, the tool that usually makes the difference in the organization’s activity among its market competitors towards survival and consequent desired contribution to the society, something which nowadays is particularly important for those which activities’ heavily rely on information. The information systems that support the tasks that it’s collaborators need to carry out in order to attain the desired products to satisfy its customer’s needs, will usually and preferably be Interactive Information Systems (IISs) that provide high performance tools by means of sophisticated Interaction Spaces (IS) that properly raise the meaning of tasks (efficiency) towards its completeness (effectiveness) and improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the organizational production process, and therefore, raise the overall organizational welfare. Goals is an approach that aims at bridging the managing Enterprise Engineering (EE) and the supporting Software Engineering (SE) domains of an organization by means of a conceptual structure that allows an increased awareness of each Software Implementation Decision (SID) implication over the IIS’s architecture (Interaction Spaces (ISs), Business Rules (BRs) and Data Entities (DEs)), to enable the study of related Software Development Effort (SDE) following Business Process Improvements (BPIs) (i.e. Business Process (BP) and/or User Tasks (UT) improvements) by focusing on obtaining increased Return of the Investment (ROI) in each iteration, as a way to attain the objective of producing a reliable Software Development Effort Estimation (SDEE) method that fits the industry. Ultimately, we believe that a change of paradigm in the way that IISs are managed and understood within organizations can result in more feasible and adequate software projects according to the organization’s capabilities, to eventually raise project success (from a precarious 30%) [1] or at least avoid financially catastrophic situations [2].