Empirical study of industrial decision making for software modernizations

This paper describes the results of an empirical study focusing on software modernization decision making in software industry. 29 decision making experts were interviewed. The main aim was to gather versatile information about their views by posing 26 questions concerning decision making. Topics of interest of these questions included: decision makers, decision making process, used and needed methods and tools, confirmation of decisions, and decision criteria. Six important themes were identified and discussed: role of intuition, economical evaluation, confirmation of the decisions, group decision making, tool support, and success and limitations of the conducted empirical study. The most important findings include the following: use of intuition in decision making is polarized, economical evaluation is important and pursued but reliable estimation of benefits is hard fo achieve, decisions are seldom confirmed, group decision support aspects appear to be important, and tool support for expert judgment needs to be improved.