A method for alignment evaluation of product strategies among stakeholders (MASS) in software intensive product development

Current practices in the industry are moving towards the market-driven development of software intensive products compared to customer-specific system development. Consequently, product management is faced with several challenges that have to be addressed as a part of the market-driven requirements engineering process. One of the important challenges is how to select the right mix of requirements, balancing shortterm and long-term gains. One way to address this challenge is to utilize product strategies for selecting requirements. However, in order to do this the internal success-critical stakeholders (SCS) involved in strategies creation and requirements selection need to be aligned with respect to a product’s strategic goals and objectives. This paper presents a method to enable the evaluation of degree of alignment between SCS with respect to the understanding and interpretation of a product’s strategy. Further, the method not only enables the evaluation of alignment, but also specifically shows misalignment, and enables the identification of leading causes. The method has been developed in collaboration with the industry and its application is shown through a case study at Ericsson AB. Copyright q 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.