The basis for building a business case in software development, a case study

In many software companies, software engineers and business decision makers live in separate worlds, using their own terminology, decision criteria, and working methods. Building a business case is one possible way to bridge the gap between business and software engineering and to increase the quality and the profitability of software development. Main empirical findings of this study are that case companies used a software business case to allocate resources between concurrent projects, to support sales and pricing activities and to identify the technical platform of their customers´ products. A business case was considered as an important part of the software development process. This paper presents the rationale for using a business case for software projects and IT services. We also present that a business case can decrease the number of service barriers, factors that affect negatively a potential IT service end user. Our results are based on both the empirical data from interviews with three case companies within our research project and the literature review.