Measuring the Impact of Emergence in Business Applications

Abstract

Enterprise software systems must be designed for flexibility to allow adaptation of their inter-organizational relationships and their products to changing requirements or contexts while retaining existing functionality and user acceptance. To support this, we introduce the notion of Emergent Enterprise Software Systems. Emergent Enterprise Software Systems combine existing software paradigms with proactive and self-x behaviors into a stable and reliable software system. This is mainly achieved via new concepts, methods, tools and technologies. One of the main challenges is how to measure the impact of emergent software, i.e., to determine the benefit of these methodological and technological solutions with regard to business goals. This requires a goal-oriented measurement approach encompassing the definition of measurement goals, the definition of metrics, and the interpretation of measured data in the underlying context. In this paper, we outline a goal-oriented approach (GQM) for quantitatively measuring the impact of emergence enablers, and an approach (GQM+Strategies) for aligning such evaluations across organizational levels.