Goal-Driven Software Development Process

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. 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. The following sections are based on the paper Goal-Driven Software Development where the GDP concept was introduced. 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: 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 ofthe 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: 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.