Return on Software: Maximizing the Return on Your Software Investment

Summary

Aside from technical feasibility, money is almost always the most important decision criterion, but it's certainly not always the only one. Quite often there are other criteria, other “attributes,” that need to be considered, and those attributes can't be cast in terms of money. This chapter presented several techniques for making decisions when there is more than one attribute to consider. The chapter covered the following major points:

• Use values are often quantifiable in terms of money. Often, however, one or more esteem-values are relevant in the decision, and esteem-values can't be quantified in terms of money. This means that decisions involving more than one attribute are inevitable.

• Decision attributes need to be chosen so that ...