A Decision-oriented Model of Software Engineering Processes

Information Systems (IS) has become one of the most valuable assets of modern organizations where they play a critical role in supporting operational and decision processes. Nevertheless, despite the large part of organizations resources invested in information technology, development of information systems (IS) faces many problems recognized in the term “software crisis”. In order to reduce the economic and social impacts of the software crisis, one widely acknowledged approach has been to improve software processes and software development methods supporting them. Nevertheless, as stressed by many authors, such solutions of the software crisis are partial and incomplete and present many weaknesses related to their technical orientation. In this paper, we present a decision-oriented model of software engineering process that integrates the multi-stakeholders nature of IS development, maintenance and use and aims at improving well-established software process models. Our framework models software engineering as nexus of decisions under uncertainty carried out by many stakeholders who behave according to principal-agent contracts.