Goal-Driven Software

Development Process

Course: software engineering economics

Introduction

Goal-Driven Software Development Process (GDP) is an iterative and

incremental software development technique. Although similar to other modern process
models, GDP is primarily focusing on identifying goals before setting the requirements and
explicitly utilizing the bottom-up design approach.
Justification

The first argument to embrace the GDP principles is the aspect of requirements.
When developing software, the strong concentration on requirements (e.g. typical
for the waterfall model) causes excessive costs and reduced quality of the
outcome, mainly due to the following reasons:
1. Requirements are usually not identical with business objectives because of the
author’s limited knowledge about technical possibilities and their costs – such
requirements tend to include unnecessary expensive wishes while excluding
technically simple features that would provide substantial benefit.
2. Formalization of the supported business process during development usually
reveals inconsistencies and gaps within that process which need to be
compensated with changes to the process itself or to the role of the software
system.
 The result of these two effects is usually a large number of change requests during and
after development (entailing time and cost overruns), therefore user involvement is
considered to be a critical project success factor.
Secondly, while established software processes refine
requirements down to an implementation, the Goal-driven
Development Process recommends trying to find an
optimal mapping between business objectives and
capabilities of the technical platform in
an iterative process, equally considering and adjusting
business goals and technical aspects to come to an
optimal, convergent solution.
Goal-driven development process allows stakeholders to:
 Discover use cases that are tailored to the requirements
according to business goals
 Establish a bridge between goals and IT architecture
Key Principles
Collaborative goal identification

 As closely related to the Goal-Question-Metric paradigm, a top-level goal is defined as

an informal description of what a stakeholder wants to change or improve in his
business environment, decomposing itself to more specific sub-goals. Moreover, a set
of questions is linked to every goal, which characterizes the way how software will be
tested against defined goals after each iteration.
 Being this the key GDP principle, the collaborative identification of goals brings
knowledge of users and software developers together. While goal definition is top-down
driven, deciding if a goal is feasible is bottom-up oriented.
Top-down and bottom-up convergence

 While the top-down orientation supports a horizontal team organization, bottom-up

approaches try to provide generalized components or services, leading to a better user
satisfaction. The collaborative identification of goals introduced by GDP allows
combining top-down with bottom-up aspects (“top-down thinking and bottom-up
acting” ) to support artifacts consistency and allowing vertical team organization.
Vertical team organization

 In contrast to horizontally organized project teams where programmers implement the

solution specified by the modeling team, the vertical organization implied by the GDP
requires skilled and qualified generalists. As stated by IBM Rational Unified Process,
individual developers can and should take multiple roles on a project to avoid
unnecessary communication overhead and conflicts.
Roles and people

Because of its vertical organization the GDP requires skilled generalists with the ability to
fulfill many roles of the process:
 Programmers (responsible for top-down and bottom-up convergence)
 Business analysts (collaborate with the programmers during goal identification and
later-on during testing)
 Software architects (keep an eye on the whole project)
 Project manager (assigns resources, keeps track of time and effort, creates a
productive environment)
 Requirement engineer
Minimizing project size

 According to GDP, another key to success in large projects is to minimize project size
in all aspects, i.e. limit the number of goals and software artifacts like documents,
requirement specifications, models, etc. but also to limit the number of project
members, to avoid mutual waiting and the size of the code.
 Minimizing size leads to an increased maintainability and changeability of the system
to business processes as they are the most likely factor to change in the future.
Activities

 Every iteration starts with the identification of business goals and their priorities and
ends with a running version of the software system corresponding to the selected goals.
 While incremental development of the software system is also done in other software
processes, the scope of GDP iteration is extended to include a discussion of business
objectives after each iteration as is believed the business objectives themselves mature
with the availability of usable implementation.
The core activities are:
 Identification and prioritization of goals (small groups of at most 5 people consisting of
stakeholders and/or business analysts, and programmers)
 Vertical distribution of tasks (selected goals are assigned to groups of at most 4
programmers)
 Implementation and testing (implementation-driven tests during implementation, goal-
driven tests at the end of each iteration)
These activities can be also divided into six main steps:[3]
 Group business requirements by goals
 Formalize goal-driven system behaviors inside processes
 Monitor advancement in the realization of the goals (optional)
 Assign responsibilities to participants of the processes
 Plug behaviors in the goal-driven architectural backbone and play
 Integrate application constraints of the actors