Identifying rationales of strategies by stakeholder relationship analysis to refine and maintain GQM+strategies models

To achieve overall business goals, GQM+Strategies® is an approach that aligns the business goals at each level of an organization to strategies and assesses the achievement of goals. Strategies derived from business goals are based on rationales (contexts and assumptions). Because extracting all rationales is an important process in the GQM+Strategies approach, we propose Context-Assumption-Matrix (CAM), which refines the GQM+Strategies model by extracting rationales based on the analysis of the relationships between stakeholders, and the Context Assumption (C/A) definition template to unify the expressive style of contexts and assumptions. To demonstrate the effectiveness of CAM, we conducted an experiment involving 43 students majoring in information sciences at Shimane University in Japan. GQM+Strategies with CAM can extract rationales more efficiently and exhaustively than GQM+Strategies alone. Moreover, when the management policy or the business environment changes, GQM+Strategies with CAM can analyze the rationales and the GQM+Strategies model easily.