Strategic Software Engineering
Current industrial partner(s): Ericsson
Name of Ph.D. student: Mahvish Khurum
Name of subproject manager/advisor: Dr. Tony Gorschek
Date updated: 14th March, 2008
Subproject goal: "Support for strategic decision making at different levels to enable better planning and the best trade-off with respect to project cost, schedules, functional contents and quality objectives for creating value for the customer"
General description
Strategic software engineering touches both software engineering and industrial technology and management. A strategic decision enables better planning and the best trade-off with respect to project cost, schedules, functional contents and quality objectives. These factors contribute to the creation of customer value and profit for the company but there are also associated risks that must be dealt with. To be able to efficiently deliver customer benefit and value for the end users of a product, system or service it is required that the development is organized as software product lines, i.e. planned development of multiple products based on a common core asset. Achieving this objective requires knowledge about organizations, processes and technologies.
A strategic decision-making perspective is a crucial foundation to any mature business process (software or otherwise), because it helps to set a context in which rational tactical decisions can subsequently be made.
Research description
- What is state-of-the-art within the strategic software engineering?
- What is the state-of-the-art within strategic decision making?
- How are strategic decisions taken in an organization at different levels?
- What factors influence strategic decision making at different levels?
- How to create a framework for strategic decision making support?
Industrial motivation
Software companies operating and competing within the 21st century have to cope with rapid changes in technology, mass customizations, shorter time-to-market and increased level of competition on a global scale. Within the continuously changing business environment, in order to stay competitive, software companies need to constantly pursue new strategies to differentiate themselves from their competition. Ericsson is faced with this situation, and for them one of the most important aspects to look into is the changing trend in the demands of their customers (operators).
The operators are turning to new and innovative services packaged as business solutions in order to improve their competitiveness. As a result Ericsson is faced with the challenge of providing rapid service deployment and efficient service life-cycle management by capitalizing on shorter-time-to-market, reusing service components already active in the networks, combining different products to package optimal services and cut back on customizations to be time and cost effective from a maintenance perspective. Ericsson wants support from research to improve their strategic decision making at different levels.
Expected impact
The expected outcome of the research can be outlined as follows:
- Knowledge about real world strategic decision making aspects
- The application and adaptation of a simple, structured framework to support strategic decision making in an industrial setting
Main research contributions
Strategic software engineering is a relatively new field. There has not been much research about strategic decision making in Industry. The aim of the research is to contribute to the evolution of this field with empirical evidence by actually piloting the contribution in Industry.
