  Most of today's products and services are software-based. Organizations that
develop software want to maintain and improve their competitiveness by
controlling software-related risks. To do this, they need to align their
business goals with software development strategies and translate them into
quantitative project management. There is also an increasing need to justify
cost and resources for software and system development and other IT services by
demonstrating their impact on an organisation's higher-level goals. For both,
linking business goals and software-related efforts in an organization is
necessary. However, this is a challenging task, and there is a lack of methods
addressing this gap. The GQM+Strategies approach effectively links goals and
strategies on all levels of an organization by means of goal-oriented
measurement. The approach is based on rationales for deciding about options
when operationalizing goals and for evaluating the success of strategies with
respect to goals.
