What about the Benefits?: A Missing Perspective in Software Engineering

Abstract

The software engineering community has always sought to build great software and continues to seek out ways and approaches for doing this. The UX movement emphasizes the usability of the developed product. Agile approaches like scrum focus on aligning the functionality and features of the final product more closely with user/customer/market requirements. The recent interest in DevOps has brought to the fore the need to address the challenges once software goes into production. Despite this, in an enterprise environment, great software does not necessarily translate into real business benefits; few investments fail because the software didn't work [1], [2]. The overwhelming evidence points to the need to actively manage to achieve the business benefits being sought [3], [4], [5], [6]. This keynote presentation introduces the concepts and practices of benefits management and benefits realization that have emerged over the last 25 years. It highlights the issues and challenges in deploying software to deliver expected business outcomes. It suggests that this is a missing perspective in software engineering. Suggestions for how this perspective might be more closely integrated with software engineering are proposed.