Aligning an organization's goals and strategies requires specifying their rationales and connections so that the links are explicit and allow for analytic reasoning about what is successful and where improvement is necessary. This book provides guidance on how to achieve this alignment, how to monitor the success of goals and strategies and use measurement to recognize potential failures, and how to close alignment gaps. It uses the GQM+Strategies approach, which provides concepts and actionable steps for creating the link between goals and strategies across an organization and allows for measurement-based decision-making. After outlining the general motivation for organizational alignment through measurement, the GQM+Strategies approach is described concisely, with a focus on the basic model that is created and the process for creating and using this model. The recommended steps of all six phases of the process are then described in detail with the help of a comprehensive application example. Finally, the industrial challenges addressed by the method and cases of its application in industry are presented, and the relations to other approaches, such as Balanced Scorecard, are described. The book concludes with supplementary material, such as checklists and guidelines, to support the application of the method. This book is aimed at organization leaders, managers, decision makers, and other professionals interested in aligning their organization's goals and strategies and establishing an efficient strategic measurement program. It is also interesting for academic researchers looking for mechanisms to integrate their research results into organizational environments.

Although software engineering can trace its beginnings to a NATO conf- ence in 1968, it cannot be said to have become an empirical science until the 1970s with the advent of the work of Prof. Victor Robert Basili of the University of Maryland. In addition to the need to engineer software was the need to understand software. Much like other sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biology, software engineering needed a discipline of obs- vation, theory formation, experimentation, and feedback. By applying the scientific method to the software engineering domain, Basili developed concepts like the Goal-Question-Metric method, the Quality-Improvement- Paradigm, and the Experience Factory to help bring a sense of order to the ad hoc developments so prevalent in the software engineering field. On the occasion of Basili's 65th birthday, we present this book c- taining reprints of 20 papers that defined much of his work. We divided the 20 papers into 6 sections, each describing a different facet of his work, and asked several individuals to write an introduction to each section. Instead of describing the scope of this book in this preface, we decided to let one of his papers, the keynote paper he gave at the International C- ference on Software Engineering in 1996 in Berlin, Germany to lead off this book. He, better than we, can best describe his views on what is - perimental software engineering.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Dagstuhl-Seminar on Empirical Software Engineering, held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany in June 2006. The 54 revised full papers in this state-of-the-art survey are organized in topical sections on the empirical paradigm, measurement and model building, technology transfer and education, as well as roadmapping.

Although software engineering can trace its beginnings to a NATO conf- ence in 1968, it cannot be said to have become an empirical science until the 1970s with the advent of the work of Prof. Victor Robert Basili of the University of Maryland. In addition to the need to engineer software was the need to understand software. Much like other sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biology, software engineering needed a discipline of obs- vation, theory formation, experimentation, and feedback. By applying the scientific method to the software engineering domain, Basili developed concepts like the Goal-Question-Metric method, the Quality-Improvement- Paradigm, and the Experience Factory to help bring a sense of order to the ad hoc developments so prevalent in the software engineering field. On the occasion of Basili's 65th birthday, we present this book c- taining reprints of 20 papers that defined much of his work. We divided the 20 papers into 6 sections, each describing a different facet of his work, and asked several individuals to write an introduction to each section. Instead of describing the scope of this book in this preface, we decided to let one of his papers, the keynote paper he gave at the International C- ference on Software Engineering in 1996 in Berlin, Germany to lead off this book. He, better than we, can best describe his views on what is - perimental software engineering.

We have only begun to understand the experimental nature of software engineering, the role of empirical studies and measurement within software engineering, and the mechanisms needed to apply them successfully. This volume presents the proceedings of a workshop whose purpose was to gather those members of the software engineering community who support an engineering approach based upon empirical studies to provide an interchange of ideas and paradigms for research. The papers in the volume are grouped into six parts corresponding to the workshop sessions: The experimental paradigm in software engineering; Objectives and context of measurement/experimentation; Procedures and mechanisms for measurement/experimentation; Measurement-based modeling; packaging for reuse/reuse of models; and technology transfer, teaching and training. Each part opens with a keynote paper and ends with a discussion summary. The workshop served as an important event in continuing to strengthen empirical software engineering as a major subdiscipline ofsoftware engineering. The deep interactions and important accomplishments from the meeting documented in these proceedings have helped identify key issues in moving software engineering as a whole towards a true engineering discipline.

Der vorliegende Tagungsband prasentiert Beitrage zur Anwendung der Software-Messung und -Bewertung in der Praxis sowie zur Untersuchung neuer Software-Systemarten hinsichtlich ihrer qualitativen und quantitativen Eigenschaft."