Is your organization maximizing the return on its investments of money, time, and personnel? Probably not, because most software professionals don't know how to consider the business aspects of their software decisions. Most don't even know that it's important to do so. Business consequences should play a critical role in all software technical choices—from choosing which projects to do, selecting software development processes, choosing algorithms and data structures, all the way to determining how much testing is enough.
Return on Software: Maximizing the Return on Your Software Investment is about making choices: software technical choices in a business context. It helps software professionals appreciate the business consequences of the decisions they make. This primer will prove a valuable reference for making the important decisions the typical software organization faces both today and down the road. Inside, you'll learn how to:
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Estimate how much each proposed software technical decision will cost, and how much it will return.
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Weigh the time frames for a software decision's costs and benefits against each other to reveal when there might be a more important factor than schedule.
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Attach a value to quality and produce a rational answer to the question, "How much testing is enough?"
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Account for risk and uncertainty in software technical decisions, such as when considering a new technology.
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Communicate your decisions in a way that speaks to the all-important bottom line.
Each chapter contains a set of self-study questions designed to help you apply the featured concepts and techniques. An enhanced online index allows you to quickly and easily search the entire text for specific topics.