Supporting Strategic Decision-Making for Selection of Software Assets

Companies developing software are constantly striving to gain or keep their competitive advantage on the market. To do so, they should balance what to develop themselves and what to get from elsewhere, which may be software components or software services. These strategic decisions need to be aligned with business objectives and the capabilities and constraints of possible options. These sourcing options include: in-house, COTS, open source and outsourcing. The objective of this paper is to present an approach to support decision-makers in selecting appropriate types of origins in a specific case that maximizes the benefits of the selected business strategy. The approach consists of three descriptive models, as well as a decision process and a knowledge repository. The three models are a decision model that comprises three cornerstones (stakeholders, origins and criteria) and is based on a taxonomy for formulating decision models in this context, and two supporting models (property models and context models).